Ahead of the launch of Immortals of Aveum, Alex Battaglia and Tom Morgan spoke with Ascendent Studios' Mark Maratea, Ju…
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Based on the timing, I'd imagine that the game didn't start on Unreal Engine 5 as it didn't exist - so did it start on Unreal Engine 4, and did it migrate to UE5? What was that like?
Mark Maratea: The project started using UE 4.20, which came out in July, and the company was formed in August [2018]. When the company first started, everything was done in blueprints with no engine code changes, as if it was a smaller indie project to prototype it out... This could have changed; the reality of the business decisions around this is that if someone stepped up as a publisher three months in and said, "you're coming, but you're using Frostbite or whatever", that would have [required] a pivot. We are lucky enough to have a very generous funding source... an amazing partner, so that's given us the autonomy to make these decisions. We started out with vanilla 4.20, vanilla 4.21, 4.23 custom engine, 4.25, 4.26, UE5 preview, UE5 actual, UE5.1, and now we are shipping as UE 5.1.1.
How does Nanite and virtual shadow maps translate to console like PS5 and Series X/S?
Julia Lichtblau: On the art side, we haven't really had to adjust anything, but perhaps Mark has been doing stuff on the back end to make that work so us artists don't have to worry as much!
Mark Maratea: I would say in some ways it works better on consoles, weirdly enough. Nanite virtualised geometry is very stream-heavy, it is all about disk I/O. So UE5 is rewriting the I/O pipeline and the optimisations they made for NVMe SSDs. It's designed to work on consoles.