Unreal Engine 4.21 Preview

[The_Distiller]

Let's hope the handful new features and pretty much nothing for rendering means more polish of existing features! I wouldn't expect 4.22 to be released in 2018, more like 1st quarter 2019.

[DarkS474]

I remember a time when swift and obj-c docs were really REALLY baaad because Apple was still figuring out how to port a lot of documentation for swift.

You don't need to document every single function of the engine, that's why the full source code is available, in the end, most of it is documented, and checking the source code gives you a better understanding of everything if you need to. Browsing the code for me has always been much better than just seeing what a function expects.

And I think the docs cover most of the aspects that non-technical people would need to know about just fine.

I see python just as a convenience, they may not do it as it would be introducing another VM parallel to the Blueprint VM, and for targeting consoles, it is just a waste of resources.
If you want to do text scripting, there are also alternatives like http://skookumscript.com/ , I've never used skookumscript, but the syntax is pretty much what you would expect and need for a game scripting language, as it was designed specifically for games.

Are you seriously telling me that you prefer having to go thru analyzing millions of lines of C++ source code just to figure out what each function, class, method, macros and so on do and how to use them properly? And to a single person how much time is that supposed to take? 3 to 5 years just studying an ever changing source code at each new release?
I can get a marketplace assets developer creating one or more plugins that do a limited number of things so to even a single person it would mean studying some thousands lines of source code only for the APIs needed to do the job... BUT... any developer using UE4 to create a whole game can't really even think about studying millions of lines of code that don't even always contain enough comments explaining what is going on. That just can't be done. No one would be able to do it alone. That is the reason why programming always needed some proper updated documents, that has always been true for any software and not just 3D engines.

Regarding Apple ... they keep doing mistakes with the transition phase to Swift indeed, changing syntax and rules so quickly between releases is a critical mistake and the reason why C++ didn't change a lot for decades, BUT still the massive amount of documents allowed developers to create apps for iOS and macOS thru the years quickly .. what couldn't be done in Swift yet was anyway still possible with Objective-C and C/C++ (although mixing languages has never been easy there). Despite their mistakes they still always offered developers a lot of documents to help coding as fast as possible and understand how everything works, that is the reason why the App Store and iOS have been such a huge success in what is just a decade.

[Zeblote]

You don't need to read millions of lines of code, just the ones near the things you want to know more about. Being able to get tons of usage examples right from the engine source is also extremely useful...

[Syed]

Yes just download UE4 with PDB options, create a project of interest.. and you can step thru in the source code quite nicely.. Of course it could be at least days before you can comprehend anything...

[chierfarchon]

I wish that you would take a look at World Composition, it's so promissing but so desperately needs working on.

[Frostydowns]

Please for the love of God fix the landscape blending to allow blending of physical materials, this was supposed to be fixed in 4.14, but was removed, it's really annoying to apply sound that's only available when you hand paint the ground instead of applying with auto blend.

https://answers.unrealengine.com/que...-physmats.html

[aussieburger]

[/LIST]Core Updates:[LIST][*]Cooker Performance. We have improved performance of the Unreal asset cooking process. We have optimized various low-level code to eliminate unnecessary operations and refactored the handling of unsolicited assets in the CookOnTheFlyServer class so that it scales better.
]

Many thanks for this! Android cook times for my projects are much faster now

One thing I've noticed with 4.21 P1 however I can't see how to do print screen stat commands anymore in VR. 4.20 had a "use debug canvas" checkbox under VR rendering settings which does not exist in 4.21 anymore. Makes sense, since this should have been on for VR projects by default, however testing with a GearVR / GO I don't see any output anymore.

Can anyone else confirm this? Is there another way it's meant to be shown now??

[Kalle_H]

When switching to mobile preview engine crashes to this assert. https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealE...rmBuffer.h#L85
This is triggered by rendering reflection captures. https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealE...ering.cpp#L336
If I return from that function immediatly game wont crash anymore. Can anyone else reproduce this?

[WolfyRig]

Anything is coming for Clothing? like import/export saving parameters?

[Kalle_H]

Exposure seems to be broken in multiple ways. Scale has changed oddly on pc. On mobile exposure don't do anything anymore. What has changed and how exposure compensation should used now?

[Mellnik]

I wish that you would take a look at World Composition, it's so promissing but so desperately needs working on.

You could post your ideas in the feedback section so Epic can evaluate.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/unre...dback-for-epic

[electra]

RTX doesnt even matter, its a completely useless tech, its not what the engine needs right now

Maybe to you and some other people, but some us are waiting for something like this for a long time. Can't wait for RTX

[kostenickj]

I wish that you would take a look at World Composition, it's so promissing but so desperately needs working on.

Agreed. World composition needs help

[Lhorkan]

Cooker Performance. We have improved performance of the Unreal asset cooking process. We have optimized various low-level code to eliminate unnecessary operations and refactored the handling of unsolicited assets in the CookOnTheFlyServer class so that it scales better.

This is easily the most exiting feature! The packaging times in Unreal now are far too high, I'm hoping to see a reduction in 4.21. Unity manages to build in mere seconds, where it takes Unreal at least 5 minutes, if not 15 for slightly larger projects.

[RoboPoco7]

hello , am getting thing this bug in unreal 4.21 and 4.20 , the problem is alot of compile shaders when changing preview too mush , as you can see


in the photo that i upload it , please report or help me fix this bug that wont allow me to use material editor cuz its too slow ,
my pc
GTX 1070
I5
16GB ram
Windows 10
and thanks!