Engine Features Preview 4/02/2015

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

New: “Radial Impact” Sample Project!

This game from Devin Sherry is fast-paced, with three different game modes to choose from. Circles are dynamically generated and you click to interact with them at just the right time. The game also plays itself while you are in the menu system. Check out the video tutorials to learn how to add elements like these to your own game!



To download this project please check out our new Community Contributions section within the Learn tab of the UE4 launcher!

Improved Auto Convex Collision

We changed the editor to use a new library for generating auto convex collision in the Static Mesh Editor. It is called V-HACD (https://code.google/p/v-hacd/), and replaces the HACD library we used before.

New: Improved Shader Complexity for Decals

The “Shader Complexity” view mode has been updated to visualize the overhead of decals.

Shader Complexity view can be used to see the impact on the pixel shading cost. It uses a pixel shader cost estimate and accumulates where multiple decals overlap. The following shows a scene without (left) and with decals (right), in normal rendering (top) and with the ShaderComplexity enabled (bottom):

​The darker color indicates a higher performance cost of those pixels. This information can be used to optimize the right shaders, remove barely visible decals or place them more efficiently. Note that the decal masking feature currently is not taken into account yet (masked parts should have a smaller constant cost because of using the stencil hardware feature).

Shader Complexity view is available in the viewport menu or by typing “viewmode ShaderComplexity” in the developer console.

New: Turntables in Persona

We now have a turntable within Persona! You can access it from Persona’s viewport toolbar:

Play will make it turn. Pause will make it stop and keep its current orientation. Stop will make it stop and reset its orientation. You can choose from a variety of speeds.

It works for all Persona modes: Skeleton, Skeletal Mesh, Animation and Anim Blueprint.

We have also added an Icon to the Playback Speed button, so it is easy to tell it apart from the Turntable Speed button at a glance.

Every new “features preview” thread makes me smile :slight_smile: Great job Epic!

Great stuff as always!

VS2015 support please, at least for DX12EAP members D:

V-HACD looks awesome :cool:

V-HACD is a huge improvement, thanks for adding that.

On a lighter side, were you folks at Epic waiting for April 2 to post this, just so that it doesn’t appear that these new features were April Fool’s joke. :slight_smile:

Didn’t stop other vendors from making jokes tho: ://www.geforce/whats-new/articles/nvidia-announces-new-titan-mini

I was using planes for decals. Good that shaders are better now.

The new auto collision looks amazing. Great work.

Hi all there,
Thank you Epic for this new,

i am not familiar with source but this Templates below are new, non ?

– FP_FirstPerson
– FP_FirstPersonBP
– TP_BlankWithPlugin

I do not see this templates in Unreal Engine 4.7.3 Binaries ?

Thank

The new auto generated collisions look great!

On the turn table, does the character actually turn so it has the Light source update? or … Is it a camera rotate around the static model and constant light source?

Thanks for being Epic! =)

V-HACD looks great and i feel like i’m gonna use it rather than creating custom collisions. Nice improvements Epic. :slight_smile:

Awesomeness - Thank you!

Looking forward to checking out the new auto collision creation with V-HACD. It looks fantastic. Great improvements, as always, guys!

I always keep an eye out for these feature previews. Impressive work. V-HACD looks like it was really needed, good job.

Finally a better auto convex generator. Nice! :smiley:

Some awesome additions, keep up the good work Epic!

so, so awesome!
I could hug you all!

also… psst… any news on improved LOD-importing?

Say I just upgraded to 4.7.4 and I noticed that in my project their is a new directory call “Developers”. What’s the intent of this directory? Is it a common area where I can place things in for ALL of my projects? That would be very cool!

Fantastic update.

[=Demolition Man;263855]
Say I just upgraded to 4.7.4 and I noticed that in my project their is a new directory call “Developers”. What’s the intent of this directory? Is it a common area where I can place things in for ALL of my projects? That would be very cool!
[/]

Hi

This folder is meant to be a repository for developers using source control to place their created assets. You can turn this off by unchecking the “Show Developer Folder” in the Content Browser Options menu.