The developers have made quite a few improvements

Oct 15, 2014 17:22 GMT  ·  By

The developers from Epic Games have released a new version of their Unreal Engine, 4.5, and they are making great progress with one of the best game engines that have support for Linux.

Ever since the release of Steam for Linux, there has been a big surge in games and new technologies for the Linux platform. A large number of indie developers have been quick to make their games ready for Linux, but the big hitters in the industry, major studios and publishers, were a little late to the party. One of the reasons is that their games were using powerful engines that didn't have Linux support.

Now, things have started to improve dramatically. Many of the game engines that previously ran only on the Windows platform are now also Linux-compatible, or at least there are some people working on it. In fact, Epic Games has announced that the next Unreal Tournament game will have Linux support, the guys from Crytek with the Crysis games have also said that they are making the CryENGINE fit for Linux use, and many other companies are doing the same.

What's new in Unreal Engine 4.5

There are a lot of Unreal-powered games out there. At the moment, most of them are still confined to Windows, but that will change with future versions of the engine. For now, from the looks of it, Unreal Engine 4 is a real competitor and it will make a big impact on the development of Linux games.

"The 4.5 release includes eagerly-awaited features such as animation retargeting, automatic C++ hot reload, light map UV generation and streaming video textures. New real-time ray traced soft shadows allow for beautifully lit dynamic scenes, and screen-space subsurface scattering enables very realistic skin materials."

"Support for mobile platforms and consoles is better than ever, and hundreds of targeted improvements in this release allow complex online games to pass console certification tests. Finally, creating user interfaces has never been easier now that Unreal Motion Graphics is ready to use!" say the Unreal Engine developers.

Unfortunately, there is no word on the Linux platform, so it seems that nothing special has been added. It would have been interesting to see if the Unreal Editor is ready for deployment, but it's missing in action. The developers have said that they will try to make it available with Unreal Engine 4.5, but it's not here and there is no indication that it will land anytime soon.