Unreal Engine 4.8 Ships Open World Features & More VR

Epic Games has released the first preview of Unreal Engine 4.8, which includes enhanced photorealistic rendering features, improved open world support and new VR innovations all rolled into one release – free to all. Watch the Unreal Engine Livestream 4.8 Preview video with Game Jam Results, and more below.

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UNREAL ENGINE 4.8 PREVIEW

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The highly anticipated 4.8 preview is now available on the Epic Games Launcher and GitHub! With this update, open world features including new foliage and grass systems with major rendering optimizations are up and running, plus SteamVR: HTC Vive is now fully supported. With UE4 developers can now also achieve 120Hz reprojection for the new Morpheus hardware and SDK!

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Check out the complete list of upgrades right here.

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4.8 Preview Summary

According to the forum post, “this list provides a brief summary of updates in this release. Full release notes will be made available with the final 4.8 release. We may not be able to provide additional information about updates at this time.”

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  • SteamVR: HTC Vive support!
  • Support for the new Morpheus hardware and SDK, including 120Hz reprojection
  • Major rendering optimizations for landscape and foliage in huge worlds (e.g. hierarchical foliage culling and rendering)
  • Grass Rendering System for landscapes. Optimized for drawing huge amounts of grass and ground clutter with temporal LOD cross-fading.
  • Procedural Foliage System (Experimental Preview), for automatic object placement in huge environments
  • Depth of Field effects have been improved to be more physically-based.
  • Motion Blur has been improved to be more realistic
  • Morph Target Animations can now generate Motion Blur (new optional Project and Material setting.)
  • New Tone Mapper with more filmic look and standardized parameters
  • Foliage Rendering optimizations, including occlusion culling support.
  • Hierarchical LOD System, for auto-clustering of actors and auto-merging of meshes/materials
  • Network Replays: Rewind support, and Live Time Scrubbing (see ShooterGame example.)
  • Web Browser UI Widgets for Unreal Motion Graphics (desktop platforms only)
  • Unreal Motion Graphics UI Editor: Many improvements (split screen support, animation workflows, device preview, full screen drag and drop.)
  • Foliage Editor UI has been redesigned to be easier to use
  • Paper2D: Tile Map Collision Authoring (Early Access)
  • Paper2D: 2D Editing mode with transform gizmo
  • Paper2D: Normal mapped sprites, and multiple textures per sprite
  • Plugin Creation Wizard (Experimental Preview). Create new editor plugins easily, thanks to Karolz on GitHub!
  • Global Editor Settings. Your window layout (and many other settings) is now remembered across all projects
  • Ctrl+Tab Window Switcher, to quickly navigate between any editor window or tab
  • In-world Component Editing: Per-instance Blueprint component property editing support
  • Blueprints: Many stability and workflow improvements. This was a major focus of the 4.8 release.
  • Blueprint Graph Wire editing (move wires with Ctrl+click, easily reroute with double-click, alt+click to remove.)
  • New Procedural Mesh Component (Early Access), for easily creating 3D meshes at runtime using Blueprints or C++
  • Static Mesh Editing: Automatic Convex Collision generation has been greatly improved (V-HACD)
  • Many new features exposed to Blueprint Scripting, include all major Game Mode features.
  • Asset Size Mapper: Visualize the memory footprint of game assets in an interactive tree map UI
  • Data Table Editor has been improved for faster iteration on spreadsheets

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