Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…That’s amazing. That’s really incredible. So what’s the state of things with Verse? And I guess what you’re outlining is if, and hopefully it is successful, this will be a big part of Unreal Engine 6. So what’s the timeline? Where do we stand today? Well, there’s a lot going on in parallel. The key thing with Verse is that we have been specifying what we think is the ultimate version of the language with all of the features we want, whereas we’ve been shipping more modest versions of language over time, and we’ve released dozens of updates to it over the past year and a half. And the idea is that the shipping version that gains more and more features over time, but each maintaining backwards compatibility with old versions, and each continuing to improve and approach the ultimate version of it as we go. And we’ve been doing this experiment entirely within the world of Unreal Editor for Fortnite for now. We want to test this and iterate with Fortnite creators in just the metaverse usage case before we make it available to all of our partners using Unreal Engine for all of their projects. And the idea is to iteratively improve it and build it out. Because right now UEFN has relatively few features for programming. It needs a lot more. And everything we add makes the world a much better place for Fortnite creators. And we’re adding major, major new APIs every few months throughout the course of this year. Whereas Unreal Engine licensees who are building standalone games already have access to the full engine through C++. They have massive, massive expectations of an API. And so we can’t release this to them until we’ve built up all of the essential features that they’ll need for building their gameplay in the future. And so we have these two different tendrils of progress. There’s Unreal Engine 5 for game developers, and there’s Unreal Engine 5 targeting the Fortnite community. And there’s different bits of development that are only in one area of it that aren’t applied to [inaudible 03:23:00]. Not all of the Unreal Engine 5 features are actually available in Fortnite because some of them we haven’t figured out or haven’t gotten to the point where we can deploy them to all seven platforms in a platform-independent way. And so the place where all of these different threads of development come together is Unreal Engine 6. And it’s a few years away. We don’t have an exact timeframe, but we could be seeing preview versions of it perhaps two to three years from now. And we’re making continuous progress towards it. So that’s really nice. So there’s this ultimate version of a language that you’re constantly working on and thinking through, and there’s the shipped version of the language that’s used by a large number of people, but still in the constrained environments of the Unreal Editor for Fortnite, so for the Fortnite game. And then there awaits the more general Unreal Editor on Unreal Engine for the lessons learned in the Fortnite context to be integrated in the more general context of creating simulated worlds for all- … general context of creating simulated worlds for all kinds of games, including Fortnite. It’s a really nice setup because you’re both… it’s a testing ground of the language in Fortnite and you’re keeping an eye on what the ultimate thing will look like also necessary to deliver all the features that we mentioned. Brilliant.…

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