INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
After a wildly successful last few months thanks to Fortnite, Epic Games is delivering some substantial new updates to its Unreal game
engine, which supports a variety of cross-platform titles and experiences
Some features like smoother compatibility on mobile and better support for Switch come directly from the fact that they&ve had to iterate so
quickly on building such a massively successful cross-platform title.
&Our engine is as good as it is because we ship games,& Epic Games CTO
Kim Libreri told TechCrunch
&How many clicks an artist has to do to be able to change the color of something or adjust the look of something is all highly optimized
because the artists scream at us day-in and day-out on the engine team if it not efficient.&
The engine enables indie developers to gain
access to a system for environment building and rendering that is on-par with the major studios
A lot of the new features come from tools that Epic Games built because it needed them for its own titles.The latest 4.20 update is fairly
notable for the engine, bringing some performance bumps but also a new visual effects engine and some other new stuff.
One of the bigger
highlights of this update is a system for rendering objects at reduced polygonal complexity when need be
The engine Proxy Levels of Detail tech competes directly with some of the technology built by Simplygon, which Microsoft acquired last year
The tech basically allows objects to render in low-poly mesh versions rather than a soft or all-or-nothing scenario, whereas you traverse an
environment, objects will just appear out of nowhere on the horizon as they render.
The company says that this tech was essential for
ensuring that Fortnite players are on an even footing even when on lower-power devices
The feature has been available in an experimental build since the most recent update, but it has been honed to be more reliable in this new
release.
Another heavy hitter of the release is the early access release of Niagara, a long-awaited visual effects editor that the company
talked about a lot at GDC
The tool allows developers a lot of control over particle physics for something like an explosion or fire and will eventually be replacing
the engine existing Cascade system.
In addition to visual effects looking more realistic, Epic is looking to give cutscenes a shot in the
arm with tech that allows developers to deliver some pretty top-notch movie-quality shots via depth-of-focus bokeh-like enhancements that
draw attention to what matters in a scene
On a similar note, Epic is releasing the tools they have been using in their work to create more realistic digital human characters.
There a
lot of other new functionality in this release, including updated AR support for Magic Leap One and ARKit 2, as well as some mixed reality
capture functionality in early access.
All of these features are available to devs now in the 4.20 update.
