I was hoping this time that there would not be a major Unreal Engine 4 update requiring a focus on evaluating and performing that update. That however seems to have been short-lived as 4.27 recently came out with quite a lot of improvements.

To say Unreal Engine 4 is expanding beyond just gaming is an understatement and has been for a while. The good thing is a lot of what they are working on or acquiring for video production, architecture, and so on can have a positive impact on game development as well.

Since the project was on the latest version if it’s not too much of a hassle it only makes sense to spend a day upgrading and making sure everything works. This just makes future updates easier to perform and ensures there is an upgrade path. Interestingly enough though they have stated that 4.27 is not compatible with UE5 early access. I suspect that will change over time. It however gives reason to hold off until more information is known.

The first part is evaluating if there are any possible changes in this new version that would be of interest to the project is. To say UE 4.27.0 is a massive beast is understated. It has a few things worth moving forward with upgrading.

The biggest is quicker lighting bake times over 4.26.2. While all the 25 zones for the game are built and have their lighting baked. You never know when a change needs to be made or something breaks requiring lighting to be redone. If a lot of zones suddenly need to have the lighting done at the quality this project is using that can take weeks of compute time for my current system. Reducing that could cover the time I ended spending upgrading to 4.27.0

Another improvement seems to be work that was done on Unreal Engine data compression for product packaging. While the raw files for the main project are over 60 gigs and the actual game itself is much smaller. Being able to shrink that even further than what 4.26.2 can do is a blessing. Uploading files from a residential internet is painfully slow.

Unreal Engine seemed to have worked on the video codec to the point it has a huge reduction in memory usage and reduced times. Since there is a lot of promotional videos that are not created yet and I know some of their old video stuff was not the best this could be a major plus. Though I have not had time to test it out for myself.

The next part can always be a bit tricky. Are all the models being used compatible with this latest version? While there are quite a few things where it would not matter there are some that could be affected in some way.

The easiest way is just to check store pages to see if 4.27 is a supported version. If I had held off by a few months I would suspect most would have updated to list 4.27 without needing to make any changes. Since this is a rather newer update happening last not most have not.

Regardless this will require some extensive testing to see if anything has broken. Along with compiling the entire project and hoping things go well. The only issue is I’m in the middle of some major reworks that will have their unknown issues that need to be resolved first.

Final Thoughts

While it seems like 4.27 could be an interesting candidate in the future to upgrade to with features we could take advantage of. For now, things are just not in the best place to be performing such a massive version upgrade to the engine.

Once everything gets finished in the current phase and cleaned up a bit more. Then some time will be put into upgrading assuming there are no major drawbacks for doing so. Sometimes you just have to put things on the shelf and finish work on what you are currently doing.

Other Posts

• 55. This Week At Nightly Dungeon 7/2/21
• 56. This Week At Nightly Dungeon 7/9/21
• 57. This Week At Nightly Dungeon 7/25/21

Information

Screenshot(s) were taken and content was written by @Enjar of @EnjarGames. Screenshot(s) are from Nightly Dungeon and Unreal Engine 4.

Game roadmap.