My understanding is, essentially, LON was a development/experimentation project for all the UE5 features, and as such is such a complex and giant mess (regardless of how it looks in the final picture) that it’s not representative of what Epic wants to share as a project demo. Valley Of the Ancients, Lyra, and Matrix awakens all have pretty clean outliners and well-documented code, and my understanding of LON is that it is far more complex and messy.
I’d still love to have it released, it looks more next-gen than anything else on offer, but at the same time, I understand why they chose not to. Would love for it to change in the future though.
Come on, EpicGames have released way messer demos including UE3 and early UE4 demos. They even released the full assets of multiple games (paragon, etc). That’s clearly not the reason. Remember this is a 4 years old demo so man power/ resources to release it is clearly not the reason as well. In a live-stream last year developers confirmed it will not be released and they don’t know why that decision has been made.
Well it would appear that despite what Victor Lerp said, if LON demonstrates unparalleled performance, it would be a rather smart move to invest the time and effort to make it available to the public?
“There would be a non-trivial amount of work required to prepare it for release.” That release I bet would not be so much demanded if things would’ve worked out as epic made people think they would.