The UE 5.6 preview is now available! Download now on the Epic Games launcher, GitHub, and Linux. You can also check out the Public Roadmap!
5.6 brings:
Vast, high-fidelity open worlds with maximum performance, and consistent 60hz frame rates.
The biggest and most powerful update yet to the animation authoring toolset.
MetaHuman Creator is now available in-engine including blending and sculpting of MetaHuman bodies plus improved visual fidelity and new realtime workflows for MetaHuman Animator.
Faster creation with Content browser 2.0 and the new Viewport toolbar layout.
The ability to build expansive, high-fidelity worlds faster than ever with powerful procedural workflows
If you’re interested in learning more about what’s coming with 5.6, tune into State of Unreal, which we’ll broadcast live from Unreal Fest Orlando on June 3 - or attend the event in person!
As a reminder, preview releases are not fully quality tested, are still under heavy active development, and should be considered as unstable until the final release. We recommend that developers make a copy of their projects for testing these builds, not to convert their projects.
Where has the “Forward Looking” section gone at the public roadmap? Are all the ideas in the section scrapped? For example all the UI/UMG stuff mentioned there?
I’m glad this update has focused a lot on performance. This is specially necessary for the Switch 2 hardware! I hope this is followed for 5.7 as many devs both indie and AAA will be targeting this console.
I’ll be posting some performance comparisons between 5.5 and 5.6. I’ve been working with a custom build and I already know that Lumen performance has been improved in a non trivial manner.
Only thing that had me worry was a performance regression on the CharacterMovementComponent (that was with a DEV 5.6 build from 15 days ago), but I will re test this again to see how it looks on this snapshot of the engine.
am i missing something, or is this a bug?
it seems like gameplay camera component doesn’t exist in blueprints now. it can’t be added to an actor, even though camera assets/rigs/directors are all able to be created and modified in the content browser.
default third person template project, 5.6 preview. gameplay cameras plugin is enabled by default. toggling it and restarting doesn’t fix it. if i convert a 5.5 project that has a gameplay camera in it, it exists in that project, but i can’t add a new one once it’s been converted (gameplay animation sample project used for example)
For those of you compling just a heads up that UMetaData seems to be deprecated or moved as I have a few plugins unable to resolve it right now as undeclared identifier. Might need some refactoring or taking a look at the release notes to see how to patch it
Nice to test the new features.
I do run into this error ‘raytracing geometry always resident memory over budget (768/256MB)’. Any suggestions where to change this value to get rid of this error? VR quality is very bad but maybe related to this error?!
Edit: found a solution. Just increase the memory using a cvar r.RayTracing.ResidentGeometryMemoryPoolSizeInMB
This is gonna be very exciting. Can’t wait to see what more features is gonna be in store for 5.6 and seeing more improvements of it too. The biggest thing that I’m hoping to know and wondering that if megalights is gonna finally add support for hair strands in 5.6 version?. Because I really do not enjoy using hair cards all the time on metahumans while I’m using megalights in 5.5 with my projects that I’m doing to be honest
Yes that’s my fault, I didn’t catch that the BlueprintSpawnableComponent meta isn’t inherited until after the Preview 1 was cut. This is fixed for 5.6 final. In the meantime, for a local fix, you’d need to add that metadata to both UGameplayCameraComponent and UGameplayCameraRigComponent. Sorry for the trouble.
I don’t know about that, but I know some of the editor toolkit code was temporarily broken, so maybe that also escaped into Preview 1… note that the buttons would only be enabled if there are any “related” assets to navigate to.
