Unreal Engine 5.9 Preview Is Out & It Was Built With AI
AI workflow enhancements, Web platform support, rendering and animation updates, and more.
Although Unreal Engine 5.8 was originally supposed to be the last major release before Unreal Engine 6, the team had already been collecting rendering and animation improvements for a possible 5.9 release next year. But just a week ago, they changed plans and decided to put together an Unreal Engine 5.9 Preview in time for the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which runs from November 12 to 15.
It's is a pretty significant release, especially when it comes to how Epic Games builds Unreal Engine. The company has been increasingly embracing AI development, and this Preview is the first engine release built primarily using agentic workflows.
"A handful of people directed fleets of agents to port the AI tooling from our UE6 development branch and implement Web as a target platform. Agents wrote the web platform code, starting from UE4's retired HTML5 platform, with engineers directing, reviewing, and testing the work.
We're using this release to learn how to build the engine with multiple people directing swarms of agents working in parallel... and we still have lots to learn. Having said that, we're already seeing benefits from this approach, and it allows us to deliver more UE5 releases with faster bug fixes and development on targeted features, all without pulling focus from UE6."
The Unreal Engine 5.9 MegaJam Preview was put together in roughly a week, with a shorter QA period than usual. Epic says it's still "cleaning up some of the agent-written code, and parts of the web renderer are prototypes we plan to refactor before the full 5.9 release ships". You can try out the Preview during the Epic AI MegaJam or test it with a copy of your own project and report any bugs you come across.
The Preview brings major improvements to Python scripting and AI-assisted workflows, including Unreal MCP, Unreal Assistant, and Unreal Canvas, Epic's AI-powered content creation tool. The release also includes enhancements to animation, rendering, and world-building, such as Lumen World Cache and better Nanite culling. It also reintroduces the Web as a target platform, allowing projects to run in browsers through WebAssembly and WebGPU.
As always, keep in mind that Preview releases are still under active development and may be unstable. Download the Unreal Engine 5.9 MegaJam Preview through the Epic Games Launcher and find a full overview of the new and updated features here.
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