Unreal Engine brings the word Photorealism to most minds. That is something has been associated with Unreal for some time now. From ray-tracing to real-time technology, destruction systems and physics, unreal has demonstrated its “Epic” capabilities.

The photorealism is one of the driving factors of Unreal Engine and it is the reason for it being used outside of gaming industry as well. Architecture, product design and filmmaking as well. It was used in the Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian and The Lion King(2019).

Unreal Engine now supports a wide variety of platforms: Windows, PlayStation 4+, Xbox One, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, AR, VR, Linux, SteamOS and HTML5. With more than 7.5 million developers using Unreal -- according to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney at GDC 2019 -- it is one of the most popular game engines.

Well, with my brief time with Unreal Engine, I think the following are some of the best it can offer.

Development as well as releasing products with Unreal Engine is free. Well almost. Initially, you had to pay a 5% royalty to Epic Games, but only when the product passes $3000 per quarter. But along with the announcement of Unreal Engine 5, the company removed all royalties on the first $1 million in revenue of the product. You are to report your earnings to Unreal with a form they provide.

Even still, this is amazing for small companies and studios as well as for the students who are interested in a cutting-edge game engine.

Unreal Engine's visual scripting system, Blueprint, is the main reason the engine is a great tool for prototyping and iteration. You drag-and-drop nodes and add wires to connect them and add logic in Blueprint. This node-based interface allows designers who don't have a technical background to explore their ideas without needing to know how to code.

Unreal Engine's ease of use is also supported by a wide range of features and tools, within an intuitive editor that is accessible to many disciplines. It provides solutions for pretty much every macro task we will need to address. Cinematics, scene layout, visual scripting, particle system, animation network, light-mapping, performance and memory tracking tools for optimisation, etc… are some of the examples.

Flexibility is one of the driving factors of Unreal Engine. It can handle a wide variety of projects with ease. Including the fact that it serves a wide variety of industries it also can handle various genres of games – action-adventure, open-world, side-scrollers, racing, etc… The Epic team has also made efforts for 2D games, but, to my humble opinion, not as extensively as its competitors.

Epic games gives you access to the entire C++ source code of the Unreal Engine. You can download the code from GitHub, tweak it and the best part is, you don’t have to pay for it as well. The ability to access the source code of the engine and modify it to specific needs did drive some companies to choose Unreal as their game engine. This also allows the users to fix the issues of the engine, themselves.

Along with enhancing the existing features, Unreal Engine 5 does bring a lot new to the table. It does give its competitors a lot more than a run for their money.

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