Lyra is one of the several cool things about UE5 that was revealed in today’s State of Unreal stream. For indie devs, I think Lyra could be a real gamechanger, and as such I think it might be worthy of its own thread.
The below quote is from the transcript, but there’s much more detail in the video above so I recommend checking it out. I linked it to start directly at the Lyra segment, where you’ll even see it being used and played.
And to get you building even faster, alongside UE5,
we’re shipping Lyra, a new starter game. It’s a complete end-to-end networked multiplayer game project that is an
excellent foundation to build a game upon without having to start from a blank slate. It’s built from modular components, utilizes Epic Online Services for matchmaking, and is designed to run on PC, console, and mobile. With Lyra, you can jump in, customize it, add new content, and begin play testing from day one.
I was thinking about this some more last night, and going forward I’ll be curious about a couple of things:
a) Will developers be forthcoming about having based their project off Lyra? Not that it matters, but I’ll be interested to see if you’ll be able to tell that certain games are Lyra projects. If there are bones that’ll be impossible to hide.
Cause it sounds like with enough time and creativity, devs will really be able to make it their own. I’m referring to this quote, that comes right after they demo a level and how easy it was to modify it:
And I did that using procedural tools that are already included with Lyra. Now, of course, we’re not limited to that. We have the entire Epic Games ecosystem. We have the Marketplace. We have Quixel Bridge. There’s even ArtStation. You can use content from those, and really make Lyra look like anything you want it to be.
b) While what they showed was a 3rd person shooter, I’m very curious about how flexible the system is. Two of the three other modes they mentioned, Elimination and Control, both sound like they’re intended for shooters as well, and that makes me think maybe it’s not very flexible at all. But then they also say “And there’s even Exploder, which is like a top-down party game.” Which is obviously something else altogether.
So, yeah… People have been talking about the democratization of game making for a little bit now. The latest one-two punch that I’m aware of is Microsoft’s ID@Azure program and now this.
As someone who is constantly amazed at the games coming out of the indie scene, I think we’re in for some pretty cool stuff in the coming years.
My first thought was someone is going to make a Halo third person shooter with this and it’s going to create a lot of drama, heh.
The good thing about these templates is to learn from them. And the important thing for Epic here is to get people to use it their own Epic online services.
It can be daunting going through piecemeal tutorials to figure out how to implement online play, cross play, and general online services like online purchases and verification. Having an example that has implemented all these things makes things a lot easier. In some cases it’s as easy as copy and pasting this stuff into your own project.
The other big announcement was their new streamlining of their online forums and allowing anyone to create their own tutorials on their website. This sharing of knowledge will surely accelerate development.
NxXic are you going to be primarily working with UE going forward? Was it the engine you used previously? Im curious if Indie devs who used Unity are considering switching or if there’s still obvious advantages in Unity from an efficiency standpoint for some.
I’m currently using UE 4 on a couch multiplayer game that I started in Unity, admittedly because I was getting photoreal visuals in UE. It’s a physics heavy game and while both use PhysX 2.0 Unity’s implementation is a little bit better. Unity also deals with things like input lag much better.
Those things as well as C# make Unity an enticing package for a lot of people. I’m trying to fight the urge to make another arcade UWP game in Unity, as I still like it a lot and I just want to release stuff (COVID is continuing to affect my ability to test the other game).
I would love to migrate to UE5 in the future (I’d have to upgrade my computer). My brother is getting heavy into photogrammetry and has used it for some music videos and those high poly objects are being imported into UE5 and being rendered in real time and looking great with Nanite. It’s amazing. At the same time we like our graphics running at 60 to 120 FPS. It seems like a one or the other situation with Nanite and Lumen.
Thanks for the insight! Have you tested the new physics stuff yet in UE5? I saw a demo which they said was running on a 1080TI. Looked really impressive. That type of stuff excites me even more than visuals.
I’m actually currently trying to port over my project to support the new physics, which was implemented in later versions of UE 4. Of course I’m running into issues that no one else is ever experienced lol but I do it hope once going it addresses some of the physics issues I’ve been having. Otherwise I will revert to the older UE 4 version and hardcode some of the physics.
The folks behind Rocket League did the same when out-of-the-box physics didn’t work for them. They simplified their physics model, made it more predictable, etc.
