Unreal Engine 4.9 released

Epic Games has released yet another significant update to its game engine and development tools. New features include:

• “Arch Vis” character controls – provides out-of-the-box
  controls appropriate for architectural visualization applications. It
  is intended to feel pleasant and natural to control at realistic world
  scales, and to enable smoother videos and live demos.
• Enhanced support for mobile devices – efficient dynamic
  shadows, movable lights and decals, etc.
• Various VR updates
• VR motion controller support
• Experimental DirectX 12 support
• Full scene particle collision – distance field GPU particle
  collision allows particles to efficiently collide with the entire scene
• Hierarchical LOD Fast Preview and Clustering
• Widget Depth Ordering – helps make sure that the closest
  screen space widget component is always on top of the other components
• Area Shadows for stationary lights
• Ambient Occlusion material mask – lets you access Lightmass
  calculated AO in your material, which can be useful for procedural
  texturing, for example to add in aging effects and dirt in areas where
  it would accumulate
• Mesh Distance Field Materials – allows your materials to
  cheaply determine the distance to the nearst solid from any point in
  space
• Improved Distance Field Ambient Occlusion
• Content Browser now supports advanced search syntax – find
  your content on projects of any size
• Collection Improvements – help you better manage assets in
  your game with collection nesting, smart collections and tagging
  functionality
• Plugin Creation Wizard – helps create new C++ plugins for
  Unreal Engine 4
• Enhanced Curve Editor – many improvements to the Curve
  Editor to make it easier to manipulate curve keys and tangents
• Non-Linear animation blending – support for many different
  blending functions between animation poses and transitions
• Bone-driven animation controllers – allow a “Driver” bone
  to dynamically affect the motion of one or more “Driven” bones. Great
  for characters that have accessories attached. You can avoid geometry
  intersecting during an animation.
• Sound Quality Levels – gives sound designers the ability to
  manage audio memory usage and (to some extent) performance for lower
  end machines/devices
• Runtime Asset Cache – stores local copies of assets that
  may not have shipped with a game. For example if you have a lot of
  procedurally created assets, or assets that come from a server, the new
  Runtime Asset Cache is a generic asset cache system that can be used to
  persistently store data generated during runtime.

Plus many other improvements, changes and bug fixes. Unreal Engine is available for free, but Epic games takes 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. No royalty is paid for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization. Find out more on Unreal Engine’s website.