Unreal Engine 5 is almost a year old. Now Meta is moving support from the old engine to the new one.

Unreal Engine 5 is almost a year old. Now Meta is moving support from the old engine to the new one.
Unreal Engine 5 will officially release on April 5, 2022. On November 15, Epic Games released version 5.1, which it says brings two of the engine’s most important new features to VR: new geometry and the Nanite and Lumen lighting systems.
In the meantime, Meta is working on moving to UE5. Now that job is done: on the Oculus Developer Blog, Meta writes that Meta Quest now officially supports Unreal Engine 5.1. The name of the corresponding plug-in has also been changed from OculusVR to MetaXR.
According to Meta, the Unreal Engine 4 v49 integrated update will be the last to include new Unreal Engine 4 features, while v55 scheduled for May 2023 will bring the final patch for UE4. After the release of v55, VR Technical Support will no longer support UE4 related tickets. Critical bug fixes will continue to be released until the end of 2023.
Little has changed for developers: they will still be able to publish Unreal Engine 4-based XR apps to the Meta Quest Store and App Lab. In fact, Meta recommends not updating if you’re in the middle of an Unreal Engine 4 project.
The reason is that Unreal Engine 5 contains “many significant feature updates and architectural changes”, the latest of which may cause performance issues. The meta has made it clear that developers who want to continue using Unreal Engine 4 even after v55 will have to forgo new features.
Studios starting new VR projects using Unreal Engine are encouraged to start with Unreal Engine 5. Meta provides documentation to help you get started.
We’ll have to wait and see what gameplay or graphics improvements Unreal Engine 5 can bring. These should only affect a few VR projects since the vast majority of Meta Quest games are developed using Unity.
The only exception is the visually impressive sci-fi game Red Matter 2 (Review), which uses a heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 4.
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