The team over at Epic Games has announced the latest release of Unreal Engine 4.11. Unreal was originally released in 1998. It is an open source 3D game engine most notable for block buster video games. A list of those games include Unreal and Unreal Tournament, Duke Nukem and BioShock. Others are some of the Harry Potter and Star Wars games, the Tom Clancy’s series and Assassin’s Creed series.
Batman: Arkham series, Borderlands, Deadpool and Dungeons & Dragons are also included in the list. Then there is Gears of War, Mass Effect and Mortal Kombat X. There are also films like Henry and Lost on the Oculus Rift. These are just a few of the products made with this engine.
What’s new in Unreal Engine 4.11?
It is worth while knowing that a majority of the changes in this new version are from the developer community. This community has made hundreds of fixes and improvements. We will mention a few of the changes in this post and the rest can be seen on the official release notes.
As is evident from the game Paragon, there are several performance and multi-threading improvements. Realistic hair shading has also been improved in this new version. That also includes realistic skin and eye shading. Still on shading, cloth has not been left out in Unreal Engine 4.11.
There is now particle depth of field as well as capsule shadows. Dithered Opacity Masks have now been included for translucent surfaces and smoother cross fades between detail levels. Anim Dynamics and Live recording of animations of a skeletal meshes during gameplay. Other goodies are new platform and SDK updates as well as better quality depth of field.
Just to mention, the platform SDKs include Oculus Rift and Oculus Mobie, PlayStation VR, SteamVR, PS4 SDK, Xbox One XDK, HTML 5 (Emscripten), Linux Clang and Apple tvOS.
There is plenty of work on VR Stereo Layers and on the Video Sequencer. Right-to-left and bi-directional text support is now included. Sound focus and sound occlusion is also included in this release. There is new work on lighting channels and faster particle rendering.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of new features in the game engine but just features that deserved a mention. Like we mentioned there is a whole list of hundreds of fixes and new features that can be found on the Unreal Engine 4 website where you can get more information.
You can go to the official website here to get more information about the game engine.
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