Sweet. Virtual Texturing.
Too bad no paragon animations features(. 
Hi! The widget reflector (and application scale value inside it) are just for debugging/testing purposes, so they shouldn’t be used to scale UE4 for general use.
This bug has reappered. Motion blur bug with skeletal meshes when using planar reflections - Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums
Too bad since Fortnite, development of the engine hit a wall, very little development or features, most boring update ever, so many features/improvements to add, 4.21 is prolly the smallest update. Like a proper programming language outside of the C++ hell… oh well.
Blueprint is a perfectly capable proper programming language. If you want a text scriping language like c#, it will anyway have the same flaws blueprint has (as it needs to run in a VM), so then, you would better use C++
For me, the only missing thing from BP is delegate parameters in blueprint functions, but still, you can get around it with interfaces, so it is not a deal breaker either.
On the other hand, these are not all the features that will come, for that, wait for the final release notes.
I’m wondering if this will end up as a minor release before we see a bunch of RTX/raytracing features in 4.22 (Epic already announced that) by the end of the year.
Sooooo I guess the control rig thingie is not fully functional in this preview yet? I cannot for the life of me figure it out.
Good question, I’d also like to know that!
Not even close, BP is only for prototyping using C++ built components, works for Epic because they know the engine inside out, for anyone else its a struggle. You cant even spawn a couple hundret actors without running into performance issues, not even unity is that bad. C# is many times faster than BP, unless you allocate alot every frame, which is silly anyway in any language.
I was hoping for something else, maybe extend that editor Python Scriptability feature to gameplay scripting aswell, and maybe use something more exotic like PyPy or Iron python.
Sadly consoles and iOS have no support for anything other than C++ and C#.
BP’s are just not cutting it, it takes soo much effort and time in this Engine API to get access to variables its insane, ive been waiting forever for improvements in the API area, for more relaxed acess rules and more flexibility. At least in unity you get some stupid functions FindGameObject with tag or by name which you can cache as ref first time you call and no one is hurt, but in UE4 holy ff…
RTX doesnt even matter, its a completely useless tech, its not what the engine needs right now, development speed/quality/featureset/documentation/free training are key for succeeding, making games is so costly and time consuming the last worry should be RTX, most games dont fail because of their poor graphics its because of bugs/slow engine/servers etc like PUBG, they cant fix that game even if you gave them 1bil$ cash free, and i feel their pain, UE4 framework is a disaster in my view, i think if they remade pubg in unity they would still get 50% more FPS.
Their roadmap hasnt been updated since last year aswell, Fortnite gave a massive hit to the engine development, with their cash cow getting fatter UE4 is getting the short end of the stick.
4.20 saw some decent development, but i still dont see any improvement to the flexibility of the API, or better docs or better C++, who the hell wastes time fighting include/template errors in 2018? not me, C# is a breeze its like those C++ issues never existed to begin with, its just a bad language.
To add, RTX/Ray Tracing is important for 3 reasons, its a tech demo that draws interest to the engine, for archviz/movie work, and it speeds up baked lighting immensely (and would work really well with Virtual Texturing and support for Lightmaps). At least 25% of games using somewhat realistic lighting rely on baked lighting.
Sad not to see any RTX/DXR in this version. We’re eagerly awaiting for this feature.
Also interested in info about Virtual Texturing. Is it in 4.21 preview? How do we use it?
Well in fact… Other c#-like options besides c++ are possible. I use Haxe with the plugin .com/proletariatgames/unreal.hx for most of my UE4 coding. It’s pretty great!
Well im glad they have new domains to expand to, but they shouldnt forget about making games, and making the tools easier/faster/more reliable to use.
Haxe looks more complex to install than programming in C++ directly. Typically anything related to C++ takes a week to figure out how to setup, while in C# you just drag the script in your project and use the class in other scripts, these are things that should have been automated a decade ago.
If only Epic Games would allow to access all APIs C++ and BluePrint thru Python everything would be easier. Allowing to program everything using Python would allow creating very complex BluePrint algorithms in a very short time, which is almost impossible to do graphically, along with allowing scripts to do a lot more. And accessing C++ thru Python at the same time as BluePrint would allow to mix coding styles as needed.
Eye texture sampling in niagara, this is something that was really missing
Accessing all APIs impossible the way UE4 is organized (or else you got your own UHT solution as that Haxe thing seems ot have;p), but anything that is binded to Blueprint can be easily accessible in python or other scripting language (any language that object oriented programming and support classes). There was scripting plugin project but it kind of desolved in to void of forgotness because surprisingly there was not much interes in it.
And C++ is not that hard as people make it to, simply people now days are too used to higher languages but you only chain yourself locking there mind in to them and Unity users aspecially got there head locked on C#, you will always need C++ to do anything beyond what you can do in blueprint and UE4 in general because engine it self is programmed in C++
This is great news! Can I finally enter an IPv6 address in the OpenLevel BP node?
Does not seem to work in UE 4.21 preview 1…
They already stated in the Python thread that there won’t be python support for the whole API!
In a thread an Epic Games employee actually replied me that runtime support of BluePrint thru Python is not planned yet but he didn’t tell that in-editor full APIs access won’t ever be available.
I can program C/C++ and assembly the problem is that Epic Games public available documents for C++ APIs are not complete and updated. If Epic Games had updated complete documents like Apple does with its iOS, macOS programming in Objective-C and Swift there wouldn’t have been any problem programming everything in C++ without using BluePrint unless forced to by Epic Games itself lacking C++ access to do the job. Now if full documents are available only to big software houses paying for the expensive custom license to the engine I don’t know but it would be obvious with what they pay for although those very expensive licenses include 24/7 technical support and full help with coding anything to get the job done with the engine. So full updated documents could be very useful to poor indie developers paying only the 5% royalties to use the engine.
At the very least it would be anyway absolutely useful the ability to code anything BluePrint using Python scripts.