14 DAY TRIAL // Today, June 1, 2016, Epic Games has had the enormous pleasure of announcing the release of Unreal Engine 4.12, a massive update for the 4.x stable series of the cross-platform and highly acclaimed game engine.
Unreal Engine 4.12 comes exactly two months after the release of Unreal Engine 4.11, bringing hundreds of updates, countless bug fixes across all platforms, a multitude of new features, and the initial implementation of some brand new technologies, such as the Vulkan Mobile Renderer.
Release highlights of Unreal Engine 4.12 include the successor to Matinee, called Sequencer, a real-time and non-linear animation and cinematics tool, which includes powerful features like live gameplay recording, cinematic cameras, and automatic keyframing.
"Sequencer allows for easier collaboration on large animation projects, because you can freely organize your sequences into as many assets as you want. Sequencer will offer to import your existing Matinee animations when you open them, but Matinee is still supported as well," says Alexander Paschall in today's announcement.
A preview of the upcoming VR Editor mode, which promises to let game developers navigate and edit levels while engaged in VR (Virtual Reality), is available as an experimental feature. Moreover, Unreal Engine 4.12 is the first update to introduce support for Google's new Daydream platform.
Initial OSVR support is here
Among other exciting new features implemented in Unreal Engine 4.12, we can mention support for real-time planar reflections, support for highly realistic surface reflections, dual-normal Clear Coat Shading Model support, and initial support for the Open-Source Virtual Reality for Gaming (OSVR) platform.
There are, of course, lots of improvements to mobile gaming (Android and iOS), along with a new Foliage scalability setting scalability system. Also worth mentioning are support for importing scenes from 3D modelling software like Blender, Maya, or Max, the ability to merge mesh actors together, as well as a new Pixel Inspector tool for analyzing pixels.
Last but not least, Unreal Engine 4.12 brings support the latest SDK releases, among which we can mention Android NDK 11c, Emscripten 1.35.0 for HTML5, PlayStation 4 SDK 3.508.031, and Xbox One March 2016 XDK. Unreal Engine 4.12 is available for download right now for all supported platforms from the official website.
