The team at Epic have announced the release of Unreal Engine 4.14 for general availability. This release comes with a host of new features, fixes and improvements from them as well as the developer community at large.
The Unreal Engine is an open source game engine written in C++ and developed by Epic Games original for the Unreal video game. It is a multi-platform engine designed for Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Windows RT using DirectX 11 and 12.
It is also supported on PlayStation 4 using GNM. On OS X, iOS, Android, Linux and Windows XP it uses OpenGL, while Vulkan and Metal are used for Android and iOS respectively. HTML5 on Web browsers is supported through JavaScript/WebGL.
Today Unreal Engine 4 is a 3D content creation suite for game developers to develop visualizations, simulations and video games.
Highlights of Unreal Engine 4.14
Starting off with development, Windows platform C++ developers can now use Visual Studio “15” or Visual Studio 2017 for development in addition to Visual Studio 2015.
On mobile, Vulkan support is now available on compatible Android devices. This includes support for drawing 3D objects on top of the UI and getting scene color and depth information.
There is now a new forward shading renderer that combines high-quality Unreal Engine 4 lighting features with Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) support! This forward renderer is well suited for VR.
Highly detailed dynamic shadows on objects are now supported via the new Contact Shadow feature. This can get self-shadowing from the parallax occlusion mapping from arbitrary lights.
Using quadric mesh simplification, Unreal Engine can now automatically reduce the polygon count of static meshes to create LODs.
Precomputing lighting for multiple lighting setups with the same geometry is now supported with this release. This improves performance with VR and architectural visualizations.
Translucent surfaces now benefit from the improved per-pixel translucent lighting. This allows specular highlights from multiple lights and image-based reflections to be computed.
This release now supports full resolution skin shading for the Subsurface Profile shading model. This results in high resolution of skin pores and wrinkles.
Other improvements include Reflection Captures from lightmaps, creation of static meshes from actors and support for NVIDIA Ansel Photography.
You can find more details about the Unreal Engine 4 in the official website here.
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