Engine Features Preview 5/21/2015

Hi

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.

MaskedWidgets.gif

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.

MaskedWidgets.gif

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.

Wohoo! Sound quality! :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :smiley:

Loving the new Foliage UI and the Sound Quality node. :slight_smile:

I guess you could say Christmas came (way) early :smiley:

http://img.moviepilot.com/assets/tarantulaV2/embedded_images/1379421722_jinglealltheway_1.gif

Would it be possible to implement a Quality level for other things in the engine, such as the material editor, animation, and blueprints?

Does the masked mode work for anything other than widgets? Does it also work on curved curved widgets or objects? I have a curved object with transparency and have been manually sorting depth and hacking its priority to appear above other translucent objects, does this solve that?

Awesome new features. I particularly like the montage ordering update!

Thanks Epic!

While nice as it is that you can now have sorted widget elements, I’m disappointed that this limited to masked. It’s confusing to me why your not sorting the UI elements back to front to begin with. Relying on the depth buffer properly sort your UI is poor form especially given that we’re talking about a bunch of planes.

Sound buffs are always nice but pleaseeeeeee add a start and end time so I can properly loop my sound library with out having to edit the duration first.

Part of the reason may be that they want to support something other than planes going forward.

Even when using only planes, if any intersect there is no correct sort order. Translucent objects are already sorted in the engine, but every sort policy has tradeoffs. The default is center of bounds to center of camera, which doesn’t work very well for close flat objects of varying sizes but is about the best you can do for particle systems and other spherical things. You can try out other policies in Project Settings…Rendering, but none will ‘just work’ for all cases.

Cheers,