Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 5.2. Among other things, this new version adds native support for Apple’s Silicon socs on Macs to the Unreal Editor, which should lead to improved performance.
Previously, users of a Mac with an Apple soc, the M1 or M2, emulating the Unreal Editor via Rosetta 2. This technique makes it possible to run applications intended for the Intel architecture on Arm Macs. The native support for Apple socs according to Epic Games to improved performance and stability. In 2020 Apple still tried to block Epic’s developer accounts which would prevent the latter from providing any support for the Unreal Engine on Apple platforms at all. That was stopped by a judge at the time.
In addition to native support, the Unreal Engine update also comes with a number of new features. For example, it offers a Procedural Content Generation framework. This should make it possible to quickly fill large scenes with procedurally generated Unreal Engine assets, which would make building large worlds “faster and more efficient”.
In addition, there is the Substrate function, which should allow ‘more control’ over the appearance of objects. Epic already demonstrated this feature a few months ago by showing that the material of a pick-up truck can be quickly turned into a metal layer.
