Welcome to Unreal Source

It's called Lore, and is described as "next-gen version control for everyone". From the announcement:

Unlike other version control solutions that optimize for source code or binary assets, 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 is particularly well-suited for projects that combine code with large binary assets for game development, media production, and other content-rich work.

In essence, this feels a lot like Epic's answer to Perforce. It is centralized and designed to work efficiently with large binary files, but it's free and open source.

As of right now, there is only a library, server, CLI, and a handful of SDKs available. An early version of the desktop client is available, but it's not yet open source and doesn't really seem ready for prime time. A full desktop client and Unreal Engine plugin are planned for 2027.

At today's State of Unreal keynote, Marcus Wassmer took the stage to talk about Epic's development plans for Unreal Engine 6 and discussed key pillars of their vision for the future. It's worth reading his blog post for the full picture, but in here are the major highlights:

• Unreal Engine 6 will see UEFN and UE5 converge into a single editor. You will still be able to ship traditional games as you do today, but UE6 is ultimately designed to build large-scale live service games and ecosystems that are increasingly interoperable with one another.
• The gameplay framework is changing significantly. Actors and Blueprints will remain in version 6.0, but they will both eventually be deprecated in favor of Scene Graph and Verse, respectively.
• Epic wants to enable "content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games, ecosystems, and engines through open standards."
• AI-assisted development is a big part of the UE6 story. The experimental MCP introduced in Unreal Engine 5.8 will eventually become a key part of the development pipeline. Epic sees AI models and related tools "playing a central role in helping you build content faster while maintaining the creative control you need."
• Unreal Engine 6 Early Access is planned for late 2027, with the full releasing coming late 2028–mid 2029.

More details will be shared in the future.

As always, you can get it on the Epic Games Launcher and GitHub. In this release:

• MegaLights, Live Link Hub, Movie Render Graph, Chaos Cloth using Dataflow, Audio Insights, and Iris are all moving to Production Ready status.
• Mesh Terrain, an experimental new mesh-based system for building complex landscapes with arbitrary shapes that don't rely on heightmaps.
• Lumen Lite, a new medium quality level for Lumen that is "twice as fast as Lumen High Quality" and is designed to enable 60 fps on Nintendo Switch 2 (and probably Steam Deck).
• Optimized shader compilation, improved PSO pre-caching, and seamless fallback rendering, all in service of killing the dreaded hitch. Simon Tourangeou during the State of Unreal keynote: "These are not flashy changes, but if you've been chasing hitches, you'll notice the difference the first time you boot."

Additionally, Epic Games continues to invest in AI-assisted development with a new, experimental MCP plugin that allows you to connect your model of choice (Claude, Gemini, etc.) directly to your UE project. Michael Lentine, Senior Director of R&D at Epic, during the State of Unreal keynote:

I don't know about you, but spending hours in a node graph trying to untangle and understand what's going on, just to change one thing, is not my idea of creativity. There has to be a better way to do this.

Take that pitch as you will.

In the meantime, here are some resources to peruse while you wait for Unreal Engine 5.8 to download and install.

• Feature highlights video
• Full release notes
• Official forum thread
• Known issues

You can claim them for free until they are replaced with a new batch on June 30, 2026 at 09:59 AM Eastern Time. I recommend claiming all of them, even if you don't plan on using them — you might need them someday.

Note: Remember to select the proper license – Personal or Professional – depending on your needs.

• DOCKS VOL.2 - Powell Dock (Modular / Low Poly) by Dekogon Studios
• Stylized Characters - Modular Stylized Character Creator - Adventurer by Polyart Studio
• White Castle by DmitriyDryzhak