14 DAY TRIAL // Today, September 1, 2016, Epic Games has been extremely happy to announce the release of yet another maintenance update of its free and cross-platform Unreal Engine 4 game engine for serious game developers.
That's right, Unreal Engine 4.13 is here, coming exactly three months after the previous maintenance update, version 4.12, to add numerous new rendering features, such as GPU morph targets, Blueprint drawing to render targets, mesh decals, and more, and a major update to Sequencer, the non-linear cinematic editor introduced in Unreal Engine 4.12, making it ready for high-end cinematography and improving live recording.
Among other changes, we can notice the implementation of Alembic support, which lets game developers import complex vertex animations, as well as a new Physical Animation component to add realistic response to physical forces to your game characters by using motors for their skeletal animation. What's more, there are lots of optimizations to dynamic shadows, support for full-precision materials, and OpenGL ES 3.1 support for Android developers.
Unreal Engine 4.13 adds many improvements to VR games
Unreal Engine 4.13 also adds many improvements to VR (Virtual Reality) games, as it now includes support for capsule shadows, as well as optimizations to the stereo instancing functionality, and there's also a new VR Template project that lets developers see how to use motion controllers to navigate and interact with their VR games, along with numerous enhancements to the VR Editor component.
"Want to build your levels while in VR? Unreal's VR Editor has been improved with support for mesh and foliage painting, a new transform gizmo, and VR color picking. Finally, you now can instantly play your game right from VR! You can turn on 'Enable VR Editing' in the Experimental section of your Editor Preferences," says Chance Ivey in the release announcement page.
Click the link above to see all the details about the new features implemented in Unreal Engine 4.13, along with screenshots. In the meantime, we recommend upgrading to this new maintenance release as soon as possible. Unreal Engine 4.13 is available for download for free from its official website and can be installed on all major computer operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
