Valley of the Ancients
Projects | | Links: Video | Sample
Valley of the Ancient is a short gameplay segment demonstrating early access features in Unreal Engine 5. Players control Echo, who appeared in the UE5 announcement trailer, as she explores an arid landscape and finds a portal to a mysterious dark realm. Inside, she navigates through a series of obstacles and battles the massive Ancient One. This sample provides a snapshot of the many quality of life features, rendering enhancements, and workflow innovations available in UE5.
Valley of the Ancient is a short gameplay segment demonstrating early access features in Unreal Engine 5. Players control Echo, who appeared in the UE5 announcement trailer, as she explores an arid landscape and finds a portal to a mysterious dark realm. Inside, she navigates through a series of obstacles and battles the massive Ancient One. This sample provides a snapshot of the many quality of life features, rendering enhancements, and workflow innovations available in UE5.
This document will take you on a guided tour through these exciting new features, and how the team at Epic Games used them to both push the limits of what is possible with real-time rendering technology while also greatly streamlining the workflow for building a vast, high-fidelity scene.
Overview The highlights of Valley of the Ancient include:
- High-end visuals rendered with Nanite and Lumen.
- A large world crafted with a library of Megascans assets and our new geometry tools.
- Destructible assets created with an improved Chaos fracture workflow.
- New paradigms for organizing level files and actors that make it easier to collaborate with many team members on one map.
- Flexible real-time animation using full-body Inverse Kinematics (IK) and motion warping to fit character motion with gameplay.
- Modular gameplay systems that can be loaded and unloaded in their entirety at runtime.
- Procedural sound effects created using the new MetaSounds system.
- A dynamic music system using Quartz to synchronize gameplay and music.
