Many features are now Production Ready in UE 5.8, including MegaLights, Audio Insights, Dataflow for Chaos Cloth, and more
Image credit: Epic Games News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on June 18, 2026 Follow Epic Games Today's State of Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest Chicago formally unveiled Unreal Engine 6 and confirmed Unreal Engine 5.8 is now available.
Here are the highlights of the show you need to know about:
Epic said the next generation of its game development engine will take the AAA game development capabilities from UE5 and "expand them with a next-generation game development pipeline" it has been building live within Fortnite.
The company said it aims to enable developers to create games of "any scale and scope once and deploy to traditional platforms, Fortnite, or their own live and potentially multi-product ecosystems."
UE6 will be built with three major initiatives:
Epic says it's targeting an early access release by the end of 2027.
Many features are now Production Ready in UE 5.8, including MegaLights, Audio Insights, Dataflow for Chaos Cloth, Live Link Hub, Iris, and Movie Render Graph. Mesh Terrain, a brand-new experimental system for authoring "complex 3D landscapes in any kind of environment without the limitations of heightfields," is also available.
Shader compilation has been optimized, along with improved deduplication, which Epic said "helped cut Fortnite's shader count by 68%."
"Lumen now features lightweight dynamic global illumination to support 60 fps on Nintendo Switch 2 and PCs," the company said. "And we've continued to expand worldbuilding capabilities and make character and animation workflows more interactive and intuitive."
Unreal Engine 5.8 also introduces a new Experimental Model Context Protocol (MCP) plugin, which enables developers to "connect models like Claude directly to UE projects."
"Rather than acting as assistants that simply copy and paste, these models can become active collaborators that understand and operate within specific Unreal Engine workflows," the company explained. "The interface is open, and so is the choice of model: build with Claude, Gemini, or whichever models best fit your needs."
New media and entertainment workflows now give artists "far greater creative control" over image and video generation than traditional text-prompt tools.
"Bringing diffusion models into Unreal Engine opens up the ability to use depth passes, normal maps, and camera data from 3D scenes as conditioning inputs alongside text prompts," Epic wrote. "The results are styled frames that respect camera framing and scene layout, extract and mesh segmented objects into reusable 3D assets, and render full video sequences with model-guided diffusion – all from within the engine."
Unreal Engine 5.8 is the "last planned major release" for Unreal Engine, although Epic stresses that it's "reserving the option to release a 5.9, if needed."
From today, a new open source next-generation version control system, Lore, is available and free to use.
Unlike other version control solutions that "optimize for source code or binary assets," Epic claims Lore delivers "high performance, reliability, and practical collaborative workflows for both, empowering developers and artists to work seamlessly together."
"Built for unprecedented scalability, Lore is designed to handle massive datasets, distributed repositories, and teams of any size," it added. "It is particularly well-suited for projects th…