Unreal Engine 4.9 released

Sep 01, 2015 by CGP Staff

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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.