Unreal Engine 4.25 released!

[DamirH]

As usual the most interesting changes are in the footnotes away from the spotlight. Let’s take a look at a few!

New: FAudioDevice lifespans have now been fully decoupled from the UWorld, meaning that you can arbitrarily spawn and use instances of the audio engine in code. This is useful for building profilers, or for rendering audio for arbitrary systems. \ Example usage: \ FAudioDeviceParams DeviceParams; \ DeviceParams.Scope = EAudioDeviceScope::Unique; \ MyAudioDeviceToRecord = AudioDeviceManager->RequestAudioDevice(DeviceParams);

This one will most likely have its uses in stuff like, loading screen audio perhaps, or cross-level music. I know there was some functionality to prevent a audio component from destroying between levels before too.

New: All test methods now return a boolean to indicate if the test passed or fail. Implemented new macros run those methods and, if they return false, insert a “return false” in the code, so that it exits the current test immediately. This lets programmers write automated tests much faster.

See comments and example in Core/Public/Misc/AutomationTest.h

Hooray for Gauntlet!

New: Added Physical Material Masks to Materials, which are used to associate multiple physical Materials with a single Material based on a mask. This is only supported when Chaos physics is enabled. In the Material, set the Physical Material Mask to a mask and Physical Material Map to an array of physical materials. In the Static Mesh properties, Support Physical Material Masks must be enabled and additional data will be stored at runtime.

This is by far the biggest thing for me in this release. No longer do you have to split your material IDs on metal, wood etc. to get proper physical materials on them. Please oh please tell me this works with landscapes too?

New: Added optional per-instance custom data for Instance Static Meshes. This comes with a material node to sample the custom data by index. Also added a Blueprint setter for the data. This data will be serialized on the InstanceStaticMesh Component. By default the number of custom data floats is 0 and this will not allocate any additional data.

This one is also gigantic. Custom data per-foliage instance!? Sign me the %!#@# up.