Devblog - The Journey to UE5 #1

Hello Squaddies, and welcome to the first installment of our Devblog “The Journey to Unreal Engine 5”.

As you might guess from the title, this is our official announcement that Unreal Engine 5 is coming to Squad! We have been cooking this for a little while now, and it will need to stay in the oven until we are happy with it! But today, we would like to show off some of what we have been doing and talk to some of our Dev team about what they are working on with their teams!

Let’s look at today's topics:

• CosmeticWorlds Team/Al Basrah

• Factions

• Vehicles

• AA & CAS

• Quality Assurance Testing

• Optimization and Performance

• New Tools and Features

• Risks and Challenges

But before we get into the topics, here’s a word from our Project Lead, Howitzer!

Howitzer: "Hi all. I wanted to put a short foreword in this Devblog to talk about what we are hoping to accomplish with the Unreal Engine 5 migration. We want this transition to help secure the game's sustainability far into the future. As Epic updates its engine, new advanced features become available that we want to be capable of using. The closer we are to the latest engine version, the easier it will be for us to use new tech, should we need it."

"One of the biggest challenges so far with our UE5 migration has been the new physics engine. It's a huge programming effort, with Design needing to set up all our vehicles again, mostly individually! We are also implementing new sound tech, so all our weapon audio is being set up and retested currently. It’s all very exciting, but time-consuming work."

"This is going to set us up for the future, giving us a new foundation, if you will, for the future of Squad to take off from. A foundation that has been years in the making."

Worlds Team

Ceeg: "So what made the team decide that Al Basrah was the map to introduce with UE5?"

Zeno: "It was one of our oldest maps with extremely outdated visual quality, yet also one of the most played maps, a pretty consistent favourite in Invasion. This is why we chose to revitalize it with the latest production pipelines and current quality standards. We also wanted a “Classic” Squad map to showcase the strengths of the new UE5 workflow and features, which acts as a proof of concept for how we want to make Squad maps moving forward."

Ceeg: "I know the players want to know… Were all the previews of Al Basrah in UE5? Did you do that deliberately to see if anyone would notice?"

Zeno: "Ha! Yes they were. All of the preview images and videos that have been released since we showcased the Al Basrah remake a couple of months ago have been from inside the UE5 engine. We were conscious that we still had not announced UE5 at the time, so we tried showcasing the current state of the map that we could have achieved in UE4. But in the future you will be able to see how far we have been able to progress the map in UE5. And it is looking amazing!"

Factions

Ceeg: "So, Factions have been working on some updates to the INS faction; tell me a little about that!"

Fuzzhead"Right! So, the Factions team has been working on a number of things for UE5, but no major independent content will