Currently evaluating UE4 for use with developing our next mobile game…
One thing that is a huge hassle with Unity is getting properly compressed PVRTC textures. Unity uses a very bad compressor that makes any textures with alpha look quite ugly. Instead, we’re forced to hack in a third party solution, but it’s a very obnoxious extra step.
Will UE4 be solving this problem on a permanent basis? I understand that lossy compression has no perfect solution, but just something that didn’t have so many artifacts that it wasnt fairly useless for RGBA textures.
I don’t know about UE4 but in UDK/UE3 the problem was with light maps, but when you disable compression they are looking amazing. As for the PVR I haven’t seen any glitches when using UE3, but I needed to turn on PVR compression in editor so they was compressed with good quality.
UE4 should be the same but can’t tell you for sure yet.
There is a limit to PVRTC. A lot of our lightmaps look like garbage no matter what. But in the Project Settings you can go to Cooker settings and change the PVRTC compression quality to 4 instead of 0. The time it takes to deploy will multiply by 32 or something, but it is worth it if you need a final high quality build.