Unreal Engine 4.26 released!

[frostic]

Nice to know...

I guess this is why VR hasn't been fixed and has progressively worsened with each new update... It's too bad, as the reason I started using Unreal was for the ease of VR development, but it's getting harder and harder to jump around all the VR issues as of late and Epic not doing anything about it.

With VR gaining in popularity...and Steam's HMD use almost doubling lately, Unreal needs to pick up the pace...or their going to be left behind, playing catchup as the competition gains. I literally spent 2 full days trying the get my Reverb G2 controllers to be recognized by either UE4.25.4 & UE4.26 in my project and finally gave up. UE4.26 is suppose to have a native plugin to use with SteamVR or OpenXR for the G2 but I couldn't even get that working in SteamVR. The funny thing is though...my Oculus Rift S 'just works' with no effort. WMR on the other hand is like pulling teeth!!! This shouldn't be happening in 2021...sorry for the rant...but I'm not the only one...

they only have one xr dev. why not apply for the job? im sure steve would want some help.

[frostic]

That's why you don't update engines, especially close to release.

no. this is why we use subversion control so you can roll back any recent changes, then download the source and compile it if you don't like an update.
if you have your engine in a subversion you can even roll back updates to it.

SUBVERSION IS KEY

[frostic]

OK good, we're not the only team thinking this. Quickly approaching our release date, and each time the engine upgrades we have to chase an ever-growing list of @#$% to go try and figure out.

Question: Erm, how does one revert back to 4.26.0? We have a persistent level that crashes the editor now while trying to compile shaders ... Log just ends with LogShaderCompilers: Display: Worker (4/61): shaders left to compile 1 ... All sub-levels can be opened fine, but the master holding mostly audio and nav stuff CTDs the editor. I'm afraid if we uninstall 4.26 that only 4.26.1 with this issue will be the only install option available.

see my last message about using SUBVERSION. saves huge headaches.

also you can open up swarm agent and validate the cache, could be a cache issue. try clearing the cache too. this will invalidate and rebuild all projects
chached data. i have had this fix issues before like you are having.

[J.C. Smith]

From the updated docs here : "If you are using the UE_4.26Chaos build, feel free to skip this section because Chaos is enabled by default." where can one find this build ?

In the Launcher if you go to your Unreal Engine Library click the + button next to Engine Versions and it will allow you to select it.

[ArkMakesGames]

Emissive rendering on groom assets doesn't work at all for me.

I thought maybe it just wasn't an intended feature but then reading this patch note in the hotfix makes me thing that it's intended but just not working?

>>Fixed! UE-104074 Hair emissive rendering does not work when several groom are on screen

Was mentioned in the patch notes for the hotfix but I still can't get groom assets to render emissive at all. No matter what setup I try to use it seems like emissive is just entirely disabled and the groom asset doesn't show any change regardless of the input value I put into the emissive channel.

Does anyone know the correct workflow or settings for getting emissive to show up on a groom asset? I've asked on the answer hub, in the 4.26 preview thread and I even posted a bug report for the emissive channel not working on groom assets but have not gotten any responses except a few with the same question as me. I haven't been able to find any documentation referring to emissive in groom assets either, it's crucial for my project to have this capability or I'll not be able to use the otherwise amazing groom rendering.

[max99x]

I have reported a bug when 4.26 came out. I have not received any follow-up, nor is the bug fixed in the hotfix.

How can I find out what's going on with my bug report?

Case # 00272712: Rich Text Block displays garbabe when it's a child of a Retainer Box

This is a major bug for us too. All our text is broken because we use RetainerBoxes with RichText widgets inside for text VFX. They display fine on fullscreen 1080p, but the size calculations are completely broken in windowed mode or any other resolution. I voted for the issue on the tracker, and it's now the 8th highest voted 4.26 issue, but it would be nice to have some sort of acknowledgement, a plan for its fix, or at least a pointer to the cause, so we know whether upgrading to 4.26 is even viable for us.

VictorLerp, I have confirmed that reverting this commit fixes the issue:
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealE...38935f81ceccbf
I do not see any immediate side effects, but I'm not familiar enough with the context to be 100% certain.

We are using a binary build, so for the time being I had to solve it by making our own copy of RetainerBox and SRetainerWidget, plus a reinterpret_cast hack to access the friend'ed FPaintArgs without permission, but this is not a viable path forward for most users.

[OverRated_AU]

4.26.1 for me after using it for awhile it develops a glitch with drop downs being the right click menu or even the variable settings they open but not visually.

[unit23]

4.26.1 crashes instantly (when holding the left mouse button while editing, in opposite to many left clicks) when I try to use the erosion or flattening tools on a newly created landscape. Landscape material is from MAWI.

Assertion failed: InTexture->IsAsyncCacheComplete() [File:D:/Build/++UE4/Sync/Engine/Source/Runtime/Landscape/Private/LandscapeEditInterface.cpp] [Line: 5666]

[CodeSpartan]

This is a major bug for us too. All our text is broken because we use RetainerBoxes with RichText widgets inside for text VFX. They display fine on fullscreen 1080p, but the size calculations are completely broken in windowed mode or any other resolution. I voted for the issue on the tracker, and it's now the 8th highest voted 4.26 issue, but it would be nice to have some sort of acknowledgement, a plan for its fix, or at least a pointer to the cause, so we know whether upgrading to 4.26 is even viable for us.

VictorLerp, I have confirmed that reverting this commit fixes the issue:
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealE...38935f81ceccbf
I do not see any immediate side effects, but I'm not familiar enough with the context to be 100% certain.

We are using a binary build, so for the time being I had to solve it by making our own copy of RetainerBox and SRetainerWidget, plus a reinterpret_cast hack to access the friend'ed FPaintArgs without permission, but this is not a viable path forward for most users.

The issue now says target fix: 4.27, so that's good news. https://issues.unrealengine.com/issue/UE-107863

[sam.new]

4.26.0 was somewhat stable on linux other than slate drag and drop crash which was there from 4.24 and briefly fixed on 4.25.4. But 4.26.1 release has made everything fully unstable. even the default scene crash on linux every few minutes due to vulkan errors (tried on different systems). It has become most unstable release on linux in few years

We promise clients and publisher that we will deliver on such and such platform seeing that unreal is supported on such and such platforms.

If linux editor and game engine is that low of a priority then it will be better for developers if you could officially say neither Unreal editor nor packed games are supported on linux anymore.

[max99x]

Another bug we're seeing is that the "Generate Navigation Only Around Navigation Invokers" setting no longer has any effect for static nav mesh builds, which makes nav builds take an order of magnitude longer on our setup (and also seem to ignore nav modifiers, but that's a separate bug). We're using this approach to build sublevel navmeshes of a large persistent level.

[b1016103]

The issue now says target fix: 4.27, so that's good news.

I admit I didn't follow the news. Last time I checked, people were talking (speculating?) how 4.26 was supposed to be the last version of UE4. Does it mean that we'll definitely have 4.27 before UE5, or is it still unclear?

[motorsep]

I admit I didn't follow the news. Last time I checked, people were talking (speculating?) how 4.26 was supposed to be the last version of UE4. Does it mean that we'll definitely have 4.27 before UE5, or is it still unclear?

UE5 is an urban myth, a legend

I'd rather get 4.28 with properly working RTXGI (and supported in forward renderer), production ready GPU Lightmass, performant Chaos physics and much needed VR fixes, than UE5 that won't be usable until UE5.x most likely (especially for VR).

[AE_3DFX]

UE5 is an urban myth, a legend

I'd rather get 4.28 with properly working RTXGI (and supported in forward renderer), production ready GPU Lightmass, performant Chaos physics and much needed VR fixes, than UE5 that won't be usable until UE5.x most likely (especially for VR).

As far i understand UE5 is still almost same as UE4 except some old stuff removed like PhysX etc... and added SSGI+Distance field GI+HeightField GI=Lumen and realtime Mesh Streaming with polygon culling or something similar(Nanite), 64 floating point prescision, but everything else almost same like now. Correct me if wrong but those are my observations. NB: Take this as grain of salt and i might be very very wrong.

[b1016103]

I was mostly just wondering about the timeline, not the features. If 4.27 is officially scheduled to come out in the spring, that puts UE5's release to the fall at the earliest. Until today I was operating under the assumption that 4.26 was the latest UE4 version planned and didn't expect or plan for a possibility of another 4.xx upgrade.