I'm sure UE5 will be great. But when software gets upgraded to its next major revision (i.e. 4.0 to 5.0) instead of just a minor revision (i.e. 4.0 to 4.1) it's bound to contain very significant interface changes and even plenty of new and improved bugs that didn't exist before. That's simply the nature of major updates like that.

So sure MWM ought to take advantage of UE5 at some point in the future. But as warlocc said I hope the Devs here do -not- try to use it anytime soon due to the trade-offs involved. If MWM does not freeze its tool baselines they will basically never be able to launch CoT.

To quote DocT from Discord: "Before anyone asks, no, we are not going to UE5 (just announced)."

Lol by the time CoT is launched and to the point where they can start thinking about considering UE5, UE6 will be out

Having watched the video a couple times. There are some really great features that would be amazing for COT's development speed. Being able to automatically/dynamically generate optimized assets from full poly renders is a massive time saver. Global illumination with multi bounce makes lighting massively simpler and less time consuming. BUT! the trade off those those things is storage and processing power.

To enable nanite you NEED a high speed SSD. Mechanical drives will not cut it. Second you need a GIANT SSD Games that ship with 8k textures that are dynamically downsampled as needed and 3D objects that are downsampled as needed means that game sizes could easily reach 1tb. No I'm not joking. Modern games are already pushing 1/4 of that once you enable developers to forego any optimization in the graphics pipeline which is great for speed and simplicity of the pipeline you pay at the other end in massive file sizes. The assets for a movie are ginormous Even for movies that feature very little CGI. When you make a game which by definition is ALL CGI, that just smashes the volume requirements. It wont happen over night but you'll start to see developers get more comfortable with using RAW assets and not optimizing and game sizes will balloon. This is the tech that the original FFXIV needed before it's retooling.

Lumen is less of a bear to implement. But IIRC COT was targeting nvidias 900 series gpus. To enable Lumen, I don't think the 900's have the technology required. Lumen is touted for next gen consoles which will be equipped with RT processors, and while Lumen is not ray tracing, I suspect it uses those same cores to enable multi-bounce without the high cost of true RT. I expect that the first gen UE5 engines will require a minimum of a 2050.

The most interesting thing(with regards to COT) I've heard about UE5 is the licensing structure. What I've read is that it's free until you earn 1M. Now, does that mean gross sales or total profit, or more likely some legalese'd combination? realistically it doesn't matter but it could give COT some wiggle room in their own licensing. Which I can't recall the details of, but given the time frame UE admins might be willing to cut COT some slack on release that might allow for some heightened development.

I did see a post the other day that tangentially related. A game developer was commenting on a technical demo (I think it was an older demo for some game) He was saying that the most flashy effects that look super cool are really not that difficult. He said he is far more impressed with the subtle things like the character rigging and the smoothness of the animation/motion and texture morphs on the character. Having seen the sausage making for COT I thought we could all relate to that comment.