Epic Games posted the major features that will be present in the next 4.6 iteration of their Unreal Engine -aka that thing that makes a good chunk of your game library work. Many of these features are noteworthy but the one that will probably make happy developers and enthusiast alike, it's the support for Oculus VR 0.4.3 SDK and Runtimes. This inclusion will make possible for VR developers to use Unreal Engine to develop on the Oculus Rift DK2.
Being the Unreal Engine one of the most widely used game engine in the market, this is good news for VR developers. They will be able to take advantage of the flexibility and support of the engine to create new visually impressive content in Virtual Reality. It will be interesting to see what talented game developers will do with such power.
There are of course many more features in this update. For instance, the precomputed lighting for emissive materials. It was not a feature that was widely used in the UE3 era since it was not spectacular so it will be interesting to see how it will look like in the new engine. Bear in mind, of course, that this is only a preview of what will be the update. Many details about the new features will be known only at the time of release.
We don't have any ETA yet for this update. Following is the list of the major features in the 4.6 version. For more details about the bug fixes and improvements, please refer to the link in the top of the article.
- Static Lighting on Instanced Static Meshes (including Foliage)
- Improvements to the GitHub branch distribution process
- UObject Improvements
- Landscape Split Out
- Humanoid Rig
- Support for Multi-Montages
- Root Motion from Everything
- Cast Unification
- Precomputed Direct Lighting from Emissive Materials
- Multiple Material Improvements
- Improvements to Montage Editing in Persona
- Keyboard and Controller input and focus unified. Controller Navigation added
- Initial support for composite fonts for Slate, UMG, and Canvas
- Cook in Editor
- Network record/replay system
- Upgraded engine to use Oculus VR 0.4.3 SDK / Runtimes
- Online sessions exposed to Blueprints
- Web Browser Support
- New Blueprint Menu System
