Engine News 8/28

Engine News

**New Features
**
**Unreal Motion Graphics/Slate DPI Scaling
**
Slate and UMG now have a built in mechanism for automatically scaling the UI for different resolutions in games.
This new system will conflict with any existing system currently in place for doing the same thing.
The game teams will also need to keep this in mind the next time they sync with main.

Inside your project settings you now have access to a curve under Project Settings > Rendering > UI.
The DPI Curve (X) = Short Side in pixels, (Y) = Scale. The default curve assumes a scale of 1 at 1080, and scales linearly up or down from there.

How To:

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Content Browser
**
Level Assets
**
Levels are now assets that can be viewed in the Content Browser!

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  •      Open a Level in the Level Editor by **double-clicking** on it.
    
  •      **Rename**, **copy**, **create**, or **delete** Levels in the Content Browser.
    
  •      **Check out** or **check in** maps in the Content Browser.
    
  •      Inspect Level references using the **Reference Viewer**.
    
  •      Drag and drop Level assets to the Levels tab to **add sublevels**.
    
  •      The "Open Level" and "Save As" dialogs have been changed to **choose Levels like assets**.
    

In addition to the features called out above, all other common asset operations should be working correctly.

**Audio
**
**Experimental Audio Streaming Option
**
When using the new experimental audio streaming option, we now have the ability to set how many sounds can be played at the same time.

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This will restrict the amount of streaming sounds that play at once, forcing any active sounds that are low priority to be stopped and preventing new low priority streams from starting.
If there are streaming sounds which are set to loop forever, these should still be restarted when they become high enough priority again.

As an example of its use, you could have a streaming ambient sound with low priority, background music with medium priority and spoken dialogue with high priority.
When the limit is left at the default of 2 streams, this will allow the ambient sound and the music to play together but when the dialogue begins the ambient sound will be dropped for the duration of the dialogue.
Once it has finished the ambient sound should be restarted.

**Misc.
**
Editor

  •      Implemented scrolling for multi-line editable text SMultiLineEditableText can now be provided with two scrollbars that it uses to manage its scroll offset. These scrollbars are typically provided by SMultiLineEditableTextBox.
    
  •      Moved GetDisplayMetrics from the application object to a static method on FDisplayMetrics.
    
  •      Allows access to display metrics before application object has been initialized.
    
  •      Added automation tests opt-in for console.
    
  •      Added an editor notification for when texture streaming is taking a while.
    

PS4

  •      Upgraded to SDK 1.750
    

Android

  •      Added support for ADPCM decoding.
    
  •      Added 'sound type' information to USoundWave
    
  •      Android uses this to detect which type of asset it needs to deal with.
    

Audio

  •      Added a function to FWaveInstance to check both whether streaming is supported and if it is using a streaming wave.
    
  •      Adding audio setting to restrict the amount of streaming sounds that can play concurrently.
    
1 Like

Awesome! Really digging the changes to levels.

[=;128436]
Awesome! Really digging the changes to levels.
[/]

Same :smiley:

Though I am much more interested in the Experimental Audio Streaming Option, which I have been watching and waiting for on the Trello Board for a very long time.

Nice!! Very, very excited about the level changes. Being able to see the Maps folder in the content browser, but not being able to see what’s inside, has always been a weird disconnect for me. Plus this will mean checking in/out levels for source control right in the editor! :slight_smile:

[= Pfisterer;128548]
this will mean checking in/out levels for source control right in the editor!
[/]

Nice, this was a real limitation of the Source Control.

For the sound dropping, is it possible to just have the lower priority sounds volume lowered instead of stopped completely?

The priority system is to prevent too many streamed sounds from a disk access point of view, so simply lowering the volume would not achieve that.

You could use passive sound mixes to dynamically manipulate the volume of one sound when another is active if you were looking to accomplish something along those lines.

I see, thanks that helps.

What happened to these weekly updates? I was really enjoying them!

I was wondering that as well. And they mentioned in the stream that an engine news update was coming soon, but that was days ago.

[=;155292]
they mentioned in the stream that an engine news update was coming soon, but that was days ago.
[/]

Preparing the release notes for the “4.5 Preview” version today took longer than we thought. They ended up being almost totally inclusive of this week’s “Engine News” so we decided to skip this week’s forum post.

Don’t worry, we’ll keep doing these of course! These posts echo our own internal updates to our game development teams about what’s going on with the engine. I believe they are critically important to both Epic and the community.

Actually I was thinking we might post these types of news threads to a different forum section. The new upcoming features are probably interesting to , not just engine code hackers, even though you may need to compile your own build from GitHub to try out the bleeding edge changes.

What do you guys think?

–

[= Fricker;158139]
Preparing the release notes for the “4.5 Preview” version today took longer than we thought. They ended up being almost totally inclusive of this week’s “Engine News” so we decided to skip this week’s forum post.

Don’t worry, we’ll keep doing these of course! These posts echo our own internal updates to our game development teams about what’s going on with the engine. I believe they are critically important to both Epic and the community.

Actually I was thinking we might post these types of news threads to a different forum section. The new upcoming features are probably interesting to , not just engine code hackers, even though you may need to compile your own build from GitHub to try out the bleeding edge changes.

What do you guys think?

–
[/]

Pretty much the main reason I come to this section is for engine news. :slight_smile: If it were in announcements or a similar section more people might be aware of it too.

[= Fricker;158139]
Preparing the release notes for the “4.5 Preview” version today took longer than we thought. They ended up being almost totally inclusive of this week’s “Engine News” so we decided to skip this week’s forum post.

Don’t worry, we’ll keep doing these of course! These posts echo our own internal updates to our game development teams about what’s going on with the engine. I believe they are critically important to both Epic and the community.

Actually I was thinking we might post these types of news threads to a different forum section. The new upcoming features are probably interesting to , not just engine code hackers, even though you may need to compile your own build from GitHub to try out the bleeding edge changes.

What do you guys think?

–
[/]

These are my favourite posts from the forums :slight_smile: It’d be nice if more people could read them yeah.

[= Fricker;158139]
They ended up being almost totally inclusive of this week’s “Engine News” so we decided to skip this week’s forum post.
[/]

Ok that explains this week, but the last update was in august, what happened to the other ones?

[]

Actually I was thinking we might post these types of news threads to a different forum section. The new upcoming features are probably interesting to , not just engine code hackers, even though you may need to compile your own build from GitHub to try out the bleeding edge changes.

What do you guys think?

[/]

Go for it! As long as there’s interesting updates to read i’ll follow to wherever they get posted!

[=LazyDodo;161258]
Ok that explains this week, but the last update was in august, what happened to the other ones?

Go for it! As long as there’s interesting updates to read i’ll follow to wherever they get posted!
[/]

I think they just missed some releases and then decided to just wait for the 4.5 release notes to catch them up. The latest engine news post can be found in the announcements forum.

I think a moderator should unsticky this old thread…

[=;210102]
I think a moderator should unsticky this old thread…
[/]

Thanks, I unstuck it. :slight_smile:

In case anyone else isn’t aware, we now post “Engine News” updates every week in the announcements forum, under threads that are titled with “Engine Features Preview”.

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