Epic Games updates Unreal Engine to add support for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X

Game developers are preparing for the arrival of next-generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony. Epic Games is also not behind in the race as it has announced an update to its Unreal Engine to bring support for Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X. The update essentially means a variety of games will be optimised for the next-gen consoles. The popular Fortnite could also be one of them.

The latest iteration, version 4.25, is also expected to help developers better prepare for the new consoles. Epic Games said that the new version only brings support for the consoles and in the future it will be rolling out more updates for "optimizations, fixes, and certification requirements to support developers launching on the next generation of consoles."

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"No matter how powerful your target platform, you'll want to squeeze every ounce of performance out of it, which is where profiling comes in. The Unreal Insights standalone profiling application now offers an improved user experience and introduces Networking Insights, which helps you optimize, analyze, and debug network traffic; we've also added a separate Animation Insights plugin to the Unreal Editor, enabling the visualization of gameplay state and live animation behavior," said the company in a blog post.

"The Fortnite team has been battle-testing Niagara VFX and Chaos physics, and these feature sets are now in use in currently shipping seasons of the game. Niagara is now production-ready, with a polished new UI and signficant performance and stability improvements. There are also a host of new features, including the ability to create complex, large-scale particle effects such as flocking and chains, and to have particles react to music or other audio sources—all in real time," it added.

Epic Games is also expanding the Unreal Engine for the LiDAR technology. The company said developers can leverage the support to import, edit, and interact with point clouds. The feature will be available through an update plugin.