Epic Overhauls UE5 City Sample, Adds PCG Levels and LLM Control
The updated sample now lets developers generate an entire city inside Unreal Engine 5 with PCG and control the process through text instructions to LLMs, a major step past the original Houdini-dependent workflow.
Reporting from 1 source: Automaton.
Epic Games updated the Unreal Engine 5 sample project City Sample to version 5.8 on August 28. The overhaul, the first large-scale renewal in four years, adds two new levels built entirely on the engine's Procedural Content Generation (PCG) feature, replacing the original Houdini-based city generation. The update also includes support for Unreal MCP and the CitySamplePCG_Demo plugin, which was shown during the State of Unreal 2026 keynote at Unreal Fest Chicago 2026.
The new City Sample drops the Houdini dependency of the 2022 release. Two new levels, a full city reproduction and a simplified sample, are built entirely on Unreal Engine 5's PCG, so the city shape can be freely regenerated through spline editing inside the engine.
The PCG-based main level omits the Mass AI traffic and pedestrian settings and the traffic light system from the original version, focusing instead on city construction with PCG. The included CitySamplePCG_Demo plugin appeared during the State of Unreal 2026 keynote at Unreal Fest Chicago 2026, where Epic detailed Unreal Engine 6 and showed developers controlling city generation by giving text instructions to LLMs such as Claude.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.