Apr: Now on Unreal Engine 5!
Unreal Engine 5 is now the official engine of nanos world!
Unreal Engine 5
We are thrilled to announce that Unreal Engine 5 is now the default engine of nanos world!!!
It was an intense month of updates, improvements and bug fixes for reaching a reasonable stable version of nanos world. We are very thankful to the testers who helped to test the stability, the migration of assets and finding bugs on it!
It's worth mention that even that UE5 "stable" was released officially by epic, there are still some bugs and improvements that need to be done, in the end of this blog we will list all known bugs we already found on UE5 and are waiting for an official fix.
With this release we are aiming to have the same experience and stability as before on nanos world. We are going to introduce more and more Unreal Engine 5 features in the upcoming updates from now on, granting they will have the proper stability and integration.
Amazing new UE5 Features
Here's some noteworthy new Unreal Engine 5 features which will be very useful for nanos world Asset creators!
New UI
Unreal Engine 5 brings a suite of improvements to the look, feel, and efficiency of the user interface, creating a modern, improved workflow for all users.
It's a way better and pleasant workflow for modders and asset creators!
Geometry Tools
Creating meshes and maps got even easier with the built-in modeling and mesh editing tools inside UE5!
Quixel Bridge
The Quixel Bridge plugin for Unreal Engine gives you full-featured access to the Megascans library within the Unreal Editor. You can browse Collections, search for specific assets, and easily add assets to your Unreal Engine projects.
It comes built-in with UE5! Just drag'n drop and you have the asset!
We are actively looking for a way to improve the Quixel Bridge pipeline into nanos world.
Chaos Destruction
The Chaos Destruction system is a collection of tools that can be used to achieve cinematic-quality levels of destruction in real time.
We've managed to already integrate an initial version of it with nanos world, you can spawn any Geometry Collection as a StaticMesh, check it out!
We are actively working on improving even more the integration with Chaos Destruction entities!
Lumen
Lumen is Unreal Engine 5's new fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system.
It provides a software-calculated Ray Tracing methods! This is a new very efficient technique for achieving Global Illumination, but it still has a cost. In our tests Lumen in Epic quality hit 50% of the FPS, and 25% on Medium. You can enable/disable it in the Game Settings.
Lumen also provides a Hardware Ray Tracing method for compatible GPUs, this is also now a setting in the Game Settings ;)
DirectX 12
Now nanos world comes with DX12 as the default RHI. Some new features such as Nanite, Lumen, and Virtual Shadow Maps run more efficiently in DX12 than in DX11.
You can switch from DX11 <-> DX12 in the Game Settings. *DX12 is required to use Hardware Ray Tracing.
Much More
You can see a list of all the new features in the Official UE5 Roadmap and also in the Official UE5 Release Notes.
It's worth mentioning other amazing features like MetaHumans, Nanite and Runtime Retargeting. Those (and many others) are still going to be tested to be actively supported on nanos world!
Reworked Water Physics
Also this month we managed to tweak a little bit our Water Physics settings. We use Unreal's Water System integrated into nanos world, and it uses a Pontoon system to make buoyancy on the objects. Props, Pickables and Vehicles have the pontoons spawned automatically in game, and since then the algorithm to calculate the size and it's force was quite primitive.
After several hours testing and doing several extremely hard math calculations we've managed to implement a new procedural algorithm which dynamically spawns pontoons through the object depending on it's size and mass. This makes rectangular objects to react properly for example (before we had only one sphere pontoon which made objects to keep rotating weirdly in water).
This new algorithm fixes the problem of having some Props being ejected and kicking infinitely over the water, and also normalizes their floating capabilities. Right now they all floats equally, we still intend to improve it by allowing custom pontoons to be set through scripting and also through the engine, and also to use Physical Materials to change the buoyancy force depending on it.
New Default Maps
We are shipping two new default maps to nanos world: OceanMap and BlankMap. The first contains a small island and a vast ocean (good for testing Water stuff), and the second is literally Empty and all black, good for dynamic scripting created maps!
We've also tweaked the size of BlankMap and it's surface texture to have a modern and UE5 look.
nanos world Migration
As we stated in the last blog we are moving to a new Store Page, the new nanos world version on UE5 will already be on this new game entry, and the old entry will be completely deactivated.
Game
All the current testers will receive a new Steam Key to activate nanos world in your Steam accounts. Here's how to get the new nanos world game key:
- WISHLIST the new game entry first 😁
- optional: Launch the old game at least once to store your achievements to automatically import them when launching the new game (this is a built-in tool to automatically export and import your stats).
- optional: Make a backup of your
Server/folder (if you are developing Packages/Assets). - optional: Uninstall the old game, although it is not obligatory, it's recommended because some problems may happen if you don't, as both games use the same folder name.
- You will receive the new Steam Key at the Auth Website. If you didn't, please reach us.
All old game keys will be revoked. You will receive an warning on Steam saying that the "Beta Test has ended".
Assets
The pipeline of exporting assets from Unreal Engine didn't change, all old tutorials are still valid but some are still using the old UE4 interface, we are constantly updating the docs to update the images and add more information to this workflow.
We've already updated the Importing Custom Assets and also the Assets Development Kit pages. There is a new workflow which has been updated to export assets, so now you don't need to package the project, just need to cook the assets - but the old way is still valid tho, the new is just easier.
The Assets Development Kit GitHub Project was updated as well, the only things that changed were the following files:
Config/DefaultEngine.iniNanosWorldADK.uproject
You can pull into your current ADK downloaded project or just replace your project with the new files. If you get problems, try deleting the following folders in your project, so you have a clean project (without the old compiled stuff):
Binaries/Saved/Intermediate/
All Assets will need to be recooked in Unreal Engine 5 to work with the new nanos world version. This is needed as from time to time the shader code or the serialized binaries are changed when the Engine changes, so we need to get in the same version otherwise the game may crash expecting to load a newer version but the file is old.
We already managed to update the official asset packs.
New Testers
We are very sorry for making the recently players which registered to become a tester to wait that long, since we are moving to the new game entry, we didn't want to give you the old keys anymore, but now we are backing to our testing invitations!
We are still aiming to invite only Modders and Scripters, if you are just a player, keep the eye on the future open Playtest sessions!
Known Bugs
Some bugs are known and are listed below, most of them we don't have much to do and are much likely an internal UE5 bug, I am reporting them all to Epic, let's pray they accept the report and fix it.
- Cables rendering not working sometimes (Epic accepted my report).
- Balloons/Cables square constraint (Epic accepted my report and already fixed it for 5.1).
- Hit events/sounds not always triggering (report not accepted yet).
- SceneCapture not bounces anymore (report not accepted yet).
- Chaos Physics sometimes freeze an object if he stands still for some small time, I did some workaround to fix it in certain cases on nanos world (when grabbing or dropping props).
Conclusion
This release of nanos world on UE5 represents our efforts to always bring the bleeding edge technology to the game. It is our main pillar to develop a platform with quality, efficiency and modularity. And by doing it right, these updates and new features become easy to integrate or make 😁.
We want to be the reference in sandbox games for the Unreal Engine (5), and we are moving in that direction!
We really appreciate everyone who has supported us so far! Every like, react, emoji or comment makes us much happier! Thank you!