As of April 5th 2022, Unreal Engine 5.0 has officially released. Of course, the first thing that happens to tool and asset creators is that everyone comes in with the same question: "When will you update to UE5?"
First of, the final release of UE 5.0 is a lot more stable than the shared preview versions before. However, it still introduces a ton of changes and problems that directly affect the amount of work needed to be able to update a project to it.
As soon as possible, but it's not as easy as it sounds at first. I am working on updating all of my existing Asset Packs to UE 5.0, but I am unable to give you a time frame when this may happen at the moment. This includes:
Updates to UE5 are not guaranteed. Also see End of Sales on same Assets
🔽 For information regarding the 👓 VRGK - Virtual Reality Game Kit, please see the FAQ below. 🔽
I do not know and it is impossible for me at the current time to give you a possible time frame. Just know that I am working on it.
You may be able to get it running without any crashes or errors, but you will not get it to work how it used to be in Unreal Engine 4.25 to 4.27. At the moment there are 2 big reasons for this.
Of course, there is a lot more problems, but this is just to point out the biggest issues. This may not sound very problematic at first, but it is a lot worse once you start to work with it.
You could actually go ahead and try to port a fresh 4.27 VRGK project to UE 5.0. It should become obvious fast that the most important functionalities are not behaving and reacting the same way like before.
As you can see, the release of Unreal Engine 5 is causing a lot more issues than expected at first. This makes me a bit unsure on how to continue with VRGK in general. Ideally it will be possible to use it in UE5 before the end of the year.
In any case, and this has been clear since the preview releases of UE5, I will have to restructure a lot of important parts inside VRGK. This directly means that there will not be an Upgrade path from VRGK 2.X to 3.X.
I am aware that this situation is not ideal for all of us, but it is how it is.
VRGK 3.0 will not be compatible with earlier Versions of VRGK! You will not be able to Upgrade your existing projects.
So what are the next steps for the Virtual Reality Game Kit?
Please not that I am unable to give you time frames for the following steps. It is easily possible that there won't be any new information for multiple months.
So, first of you may be wondering why I don't try to go straight to UE5 Development and continue to work on UE4. The easy answer to this is, that UE4 is heavily used and tested. It is as stable as it gets at the moment and there still are and will be projects that will use UE4 instead of UE5.
From my current usage of UE 5.0, it looks not stable at all in a lot of important areas related to my work specifically. This is also why I write 5.X instead of 5.0 above, because at the moment I am actually more aiming towards getting VRGK updated for 5.1 or newer. There is a chance that some of the biggest issues just disappear and get fixed by then.
In any case, doing it this way ensures that VRGK still gets new features and optimizations on its own, without getting stopped by endlessly trying to update it to the new Unreal Engine 5.0 release.
So even in the case that the UE5 Update is still not easily possible by the end of the VRGK 3.0 development, you will still get access to all of the 3.0 Features with Unreal Engine 4.27 and can make games with it.