Unreal Engine 6 is bringing generative AI into its development tools

Epic Games has revealed what developers can expect from the recently announced Unreal Engine 6, including the Verse programming language, deeper AI integrations and a merger of Unreal Engine and Unreal Editor for Fortnite.

Explaining the direction in a single line, Epic says, “UE4 opened the engine up to everyone. UE5 reinvented how we build worlds. UE6 is about evolving how we ship and operate them.” This will unify UE5 and UEFN, with the latter having debuted the Verse programming language and having a direct spout into publishing to Fortnite.

Epic explains:

UE6 exists distinctly from an incremental UE5 development path because three things about game development need to change at the same time

• • We’re moving the gameplay programming model to Verse, which transactionalizes C++, for increased accessibility of development and so that we can build persistent, large-scale, live experiences with thousands of contributors.
  • We’re enabling content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games, ecosystems, and engines through open standards, to enable developer collaboration on much greater scales than ever before.
  • We’re building development pipeline features such as an MCP with integrations for Claude, Gemini, and others, as creativity and productivity multipliers so that teams can focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time-consuming manual tasks.

Without getting too deeply into the weeds, Epic is pushing the creative angle here for how and why it’s implementing generative AI into Unreal Engine 6, similar to how gen AI is being implemented in tools from Apple, Microsoft and other platforms. For all the ills that generative AI is bringing to the world of tech, the roots of Large Language Models as being able to rapidly translate between human languages means that it is also becoming increasingly capable at producing machine code.

For Unreal Engine 6, Epic aims to take it further than coding, saying “we see it helping tighten iteration loops and reducing time-consuming manual setup of levels, character rigs, particle systems, skinning bone weights, as well as adjusting lighting, etc: all the manual work required to translate professional creative intent into interactive, performant, and cross-platform games.”

A significant example here was to create a scene using pre-created assets with flat lighting and then use this as a key part of the prompt for diffusion models to work from, adding an underwater look to a room, or watercolour effect.

Epic are marching right into the grey area of generative AI use, then, where developers are repeatedly caught having used generated concept art and placeholder assets and suffering significant online backlash.

It now makes much more sense why Epic boss Tim Sweeney aired his dislike of Steam’s public disclosures over AI use for game store pages.

On a technical level, any game using Unreal Engine might soon have to state that AI was used in the game engine’s creation, because “Internally at Epic, we’ve been doing a lot of investigation to see what works and what doesn’t for code generation. We recently opened up pretty broad usage for code generation and AI analysis across our backend, engine, and game development engineering teams.”

Source: Epic

Tags: Unreal Engine 6