Unreal Engine 5.8 Preview

Hi team,

Like many here, I look forward to every new Unreal release, both for the new features and in the hope of seeing some long-standing VR/XR bugs finally addressed, especially the ones that show up as soon as Instanced Stereo is enabled.

Since 5.4, it feels like a bit of a moving target: some features work on one version, then break on the right eye in the next, and 5.8 doesn’t seem to fix them either. I’ve patched a few of them locally on my side, but I keep stumbling onto new ones.

A few concrete examples:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/bug-in-vr-since-5-6-and-5-7-preview-with-instanced-stereo-baked-reflection-capture-deferred-rendering-post-process-volume/2660169/5

https://issues.unrealengine.com/issue/UE-347065

And one I ran into more recently: custom mesh voxelized fog volumes also fail in VR with Instanced Stereo.

Some of these can actually be fixed quite simply, several are tied to this PR which broke a number of things for VR, and I’ve left a comment there explaining the fix:

https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/12854

Others will probably require deeper changes on the C++ side, but at least a few are low-hanging fruit.

I’ve reported several through the issue tracker, but unfortunately none of them have been picked up so far, and without feedback I’m not sure if they ever will be.

I totally get that VR/XR isn’t the hottest topic right now, but it’s still a really important platform for a lot of us, and these bugs are genuinely painful to work around. Would love to see a small dedicated pass of testing and fixes on the VR side in a future release. :folded_hands:

Thanks for all the great work in the meantime!

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