We’re excited to share a few of the new features now available on the Master branch on GitHub. To be able to try out these new features, you will need to download the source code for the Master branch and build the Engine yourself. For more information about how to build the Engine from source code, please see this page. The Master branch on GitHub is constantly being updated and is not quality tested so it may be potentially unstable. We do not recommend using the Master branch for project development. If you wish to wait, these features will be made available to all in an upcoming official release.
Engine News
New Features
Color Picker Update
The color or texture you pick/make in Photoshop should now be identical to the color or texture in the engine rendered by UMG/Slate. Similarly this should also be the case in the scene, if you were not running the tone mapper in an unlit environment.
There is a new advanced property on textures, “Use Legacy Gamma”. All existing textures will maintain their sRGB space as Gamma 2.2, as to not invalidate all DDCs everywhere. Unchecking that will change your textures if set to bSRGB=true, to use the new sRGB conversion and not Gamma 2.2.
Also here’s a shot of the results after I used the eye dropper on the color picker to pick the color in Photoshop, to tint some text in UMG, I get the same orange!
-Technical Jargon-
A lot of places in the engine assumed a Gamma 2.2 space when converting from a Gamma space color or texture to linear space. The problem with that, is that the color you’re viewing is likely not in Gamma 2.2 space, it’s in sRGB Gamma space. So when we finally go back from linear space to sRGB-IEC 61966 space we use on the GPU, the color you put in, wasn’t the color you got out. Now we do sRGB-IEC 61966 -> Linear -> sRGB-IEC 61966. If you use the eye dropper on Mac in the color picker, we assume a Gamma 2.2 space when converting to linear, as that’s the expected final color space of your render on that platform.
Pivot Offset feature
New for 4.9 is the Pivot Offset feature which allows a custom pivot point to be set for any actor. This is a more version of the now-deprecated PrePivot facility which used to exist for Brushes.
The pivot can now always be moved (in any viewport) with Alt+MMB, and set as the Pivot Offset for an actor via the Pivot submenu in the viewport context menu. This is an editor-only property, and doesn’t affect the actual transform of the Actor in the way that the Brush Prepivot used to.
These actions can of course be bound to keypresses in the normal way:
Spline Component Improvements
SplineComponent has had new features added, the biggest of which is the ability to specify arbitrary scale and rotation at each point, as shown above. The spline visualizer has had several bugs fixed, and has been improved to offer the ability to edit these new properties. Scale and rotation visualization needs to be turned on explicitly via the right click context menu:
The API has also been improved, implementing missing features and new functionality. All methods now take a ESplineCoordinateSpace value which specifies whether the values are intended for use in local or world space. This vastly simplifies the Blueprint editor context menu as a single function now replaces two functions from before. The old functions remain available but deprecated.
AllowSplineEditingPerInstance is deprecated as it was confusing some users - now the default is that all splines are editable, unless the component is in a Blueprint whose User Construction Script sets the spline up itself. In this case, the spline is visualized in a ‘read only’ mode.
There have also been a number of runtime performance improvements (notably when constructing a SplineComponent).
Blueprint Node Alignment
We now support a set of alignment functions for blueprint graphs - obsess over your blueprint node alignment no more! All standard bounary-alignment functions are available, along with 2 distribution functions to evenly space the selected nodes vertically and horizontally.
These can be optionally bound to keyboard shortcuts inside Editor Preferences / Keyboard Shortcuts / Graph Editor, for further workflow improvements