From a development standpoint, you can see how having uncertainty whether or not a feature will work after packaging can be an issue. Say I’m relying on GPU particles to create an effect that has gameplay significance. Well, if I can’t guarantee whether a device will support it or not, then I need to build my project with that limitation in mind. It would be very useful to have a list that helps us understand what features do work to ensure a stable release.
Nice! Thank you for letting me know! The documentation should definitely be updated.
In the documentation there was a whole section regarding different lighting tiers for Android and iOS. The top tier was HDR with a single stationary sun over the entire map. This does take a much bigger performance hit over the static lighting, fully rough, and LDR tiers because it enables specular highlights for everything in the world.
In my personal experience, WPO did not work in the mobile previewer, even when using vertex data alone, so I marked it as unsupported. Other users had issues getting it to work, and someone from Epic’s staff said some material nodes are not supported for mobile development, but they didn’t say anything more as far as what those nodes were. The other user used Simple Grass Wind, I made my own displacement from sine waves. Since other users and myself both had issues with WPO, I marked it as unsupported. But if this is only true for certain nodes, it would be nice to know what those nodes are.
Really? I heard distance field shadows were not supported on Mobile as they were a DX 11-only feature. Does mobile use distance fields instead of Lightmass for shadow baking?
I know mobile rendering means not all features will be supported - I’m willing to accept this. But I need to know what is supported VS. what isn’t from a wide perspective. Ideally, if Epic could have a spreadsheet that shows us what features are supported on ES2, 3.1/Vulkan, and iOS Metal, it would be much easier for developers to know ahead of time what can be used to build the game. I started a game that relied heavily on mesh instancing for dense foliage and general construction, and hearing it might have to be emulated in the CPU on some older devices is making me nervous. I just barely fleshed out the world and there are already thousands of draw calls due to instancing.
I also heard I need to compile the engine from the source in order to enable any 3.1 features, so by using the engine from the launcher I won’t have any access to that. I’m getting a lot of mixed messages with regards to how mobile rendering on UE4 actually works. Being unable to test on my Galaxy S7 and relying on the mobile previewer is not helping, either.