Back at GDC 2023 Epic Games made several announcements, the release of Unreal For Fortnite as well as the Unreal 5.2 beta which included new procedural content generation tools showcased in a demo called Electric Dreams. The demo was thusly named due to being able to drive a Rivian electric vehicle around a world created in UE 5.2 using procedural generation, Lumen, Nanite and more. Yesterday Epic released that demo on the Unreal Marketplace, minus the Rivian. I assume this is for copyright reasons, as Unreal developers are free to use this demo and it’s included assets however they like, including in commercial projects.
If you are interested in checking out the Electric Dreams demo, an advanced warning… it’s big. Very big. Weighting in at over 60GB it also has fairly beefy system requirements:
CPU: Intel i9 with 8 cores (16 logical) 3.6 GHz
Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 2080 with 8 GB VRAMUnreal Engine 5.2 or higher
Epic Games describe the Electric Dreams project as follows:
At this year’s State of Unreal at GDC, we offered a first look at an Experimental new feature that would ship with the upcoming Unreal Engine 5.2 release. The demo, entitled Electric Dreams, showed off the Procedural Content Generation framework (PCG), as well as a new material authoring system called Substrate, and the latest physics developments.
The Electric Dreams Environment Sample Project enables you to explore the demo’s jungle environment, which was constructed using just a handful of Quixel assets. With these assets, PCG is able to quickly and seamlessly populate worlds, which can be adjusted in real time based on gameplay or other requirements.
In addition to PCG, the sample includes a Substrate opal shader ball, and demonstrates other UE5 features, including Lumen, Nanite, and Soundscape.
Key Links
Unreal Dreams Marketplace Link
You can learn more about the Electric Dream demo and procedural generation in Unreal Engine in the video below.