Hi.
Unreal Engine 1 was out in 1998
Unreal Engine 2 was out in 2001, with the code core and rendering engine completely rewritten
Unreal Engine 3 was out in 2006
Unreal Engine 4 was out in 2014
From UE3 release to UE4, it took about 8 years. Unlike other engines, that in their next versions they keep their base features, each version of Unreal Engine is a completely a new engine.
Now, as you could see, Unreal Engine 4 gets updates, named 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 . Each one is released after a few months. In a few years, UE4 will reach the version 4.9 . After that, the engine will be named UE5, like in the case of Unity, or Unreal Engine 4.9764 , 4.9765… . Will Unreal Engine 5 be different than UE4, or it will remain mainly the same, with updated features ?
Wow…I was about to make this exact same thread. You beat me :). I was wondering the same thing. In 2 months they reached 4.2, so maybe by next year will there be Unreal Engine 5 or Unreal Engine 4 v5.0 or maybe Unreal Engine 4 CS3, CS4 etc?
Even though UE4 was released to the public in 2014, AAA companies (licensees) already had it from May 2012.
Actually UE1 and UE2 had a lot in common. Actually the engine version number was consistent for them. UE1 ended somewhere at 451 (don’t remember of any larger number ATM), The lowest UE2 version known to me is 777 (Used in game “Devastation”) and ended at around 3369 (which was called UE2.5). UE3 was a major step, but still kept some stuff from older engines.
That is not how version numbers work. The “.” is not a decimal dot but a separator. The first number is major version, then comes minor update and lastly hotfix number. So after 4.9 comes 4.10 and then 4.11. They can release 5.0 any time they want, when they think is makes sense.
