In this releases, we upgraded the engine to Unreal 5. We also added cross play support between Steam and Epic and modified the game play after receiving feedback from players. Unreal 5 required us to change a lot under the hood, like our key rebinding and server browsing system. It also brought new bugs that we had to fix. Overall, though, the upgrade process went smoothly.
We would have preferred to stay on Unreal 4, but since this is a community project and the vast majority of developers want to learn to work with the newer engine, we decided to make the move.
We know Unreal 5 has been receiving some bad press over the past few years, especially in regards to performance. We noticed this too, but for our project it’s not as severe on newer video cards when using settings similar to what was typical for Unreal 4.
Upgrading from Unreal Engine 4.26 to 5.1 resulted in a ~9% performance loss on low end hardware like the nVidia GT 1030. We still want to target older hardware and will look into ways to increase performance. To greatly increase the performance of the engine, we disabled the resource heavy features like Lumen and Nanite.
One of the other ways we maintained close to Unreal 4 levels of performance was by sticking with TAA anti-aliasing instead of TSA. On cards like the GT 1030, the framerate dropped by 55% using TSA anti-aliasing. If we wanted to improve performance even further, we could have disabled SSR for this release and the loss would have only been 2%. But we decide to keep it enabled otherwise some of our reflections would not look right.
We hope you enjoy the changes. And as always, please let us know if you have any issues or find any bugs in the game.
New Features:
Upgraded to Unreal Engine 5.
Added cross play support between Steam and Epic.
Modified the introductory game play.
Bug Fixes:
- As reported by a player, we fixed an audio replication issues on clients where the falloff with distance wasn’t working and clients could hear what the hosting player was doing. Thank you for the bug report.
- Also, various bugs were fixed that were a result of upgrading to Unreal 5.