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I’ll be taking over the Engine News for . Thank you for all of your hard work on getting this information out previously and showing me the ropes!
Engine News
New Features
Redesigned Foliage Edit Mode
The foliage edit mode UI has recently undergone a redesign! Besides improved usability, the new layout gives you the ability to more easily work with a large number of foliage types in the palette at once.
Masked Widget Component
Widget components now support a Masked blend mode. So you can make them either, Opaque, Transparent, or Masked. Masked lets you have proper depth sorting.
Montage Trigger Ordering
We’ve added a new panel to the Montage editor to help you control the order that Montage events will fire when your animations execute at runtime.
Sound Quality Levels
A new feature has been added that gives sound designers the ability to manage audio memory usage and (to some extent) performance for lower end machines/devices.
The available Sound Quality Levels are defined in the Audio section of the Project Settings. Each Quality Level can currently specify the maximum number of audio channels created by the audio device (though some platforms, notably Android, can still limit that value a lower number).
In a Sound Cue you can place a Quality Level sound node that will provide an input pin for each Quality Level defined in the Project Settings and only the branch connected to the active Quality Level will be executed. This can be used to reduce the number of variations that are loaded or it could be used to specify reduced fidelity wave files.
When playing a standalone game, the Quality Level is specified via the Game User Settings and only the Sound Waves that are needed for that Quality Level will be loaded in to memory. The default value can be set per game or platform via the appropriate GameUserSettings.ini file and games can allow setting the value via their settings UI. Currently, the game will need to be restarted for the quality changes to take effect.
For Play in Editor you can specify which Quality Level to use via the Level Editor Play Settings. Changing this value will work while the Play session is active and new sounds will use the current Quality Level.