14 DAY TRIAL // On November 15, 2016, Epic Games, through Alexander Paschall, was pleased to announce the general availability of Unreal Engine 4.14 for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS.
It's been more than two months since Unreal Engine 4.13 was released with its Alembic support for allowing game developers to import complex vertex animations and a new Physical Animation component for adding realistic response to physical forces to your game characters. And now, you can update your Unreal Engine software to version 4.14, another major release that brings lots of goodies.
Prominent new features in Unreal Engine 4.14 include a forward shading renderer optimized for VR (Virtual Reality) to enable crisp, multi-sampled anti-aliasing in your games, a Contact Shadows feature for rendering delightfully accurate shadows for intricate objects, an automatic LOD (Level Of Detail) generation feature, which is very useful for static meshes and doesn't use third-party libs.
"We’ve streamlined the animation tools to help you be more productive, and added many new features to Sequencer (UE4’s non-linear cinematic tool), as well as improvements to vehicles, clothing and animation Blueprints," said Alexander Paschall in today's announcement. "And, we've added various new mobile rendering features such as reading from scene color and depth, and the ability to draw 3D objects on top of your UI."
Vulkan support now available for compatible Android devices
Another interesting feature implemented in the Unreal Engine 4.14 release is the implementation of Vulkan support for compatible Android devices, which we bet mobile developers will love. Best of all, there's now support for the Xbox One August 2016 QFE 2, Playstation 4 PSR SDK 4.008.061, Emscripten 1.36.13, macOS 10.12 Sierra, Xcode 8.1, iOS 10, and tvOS 10 SDKs (Software Development Kits).
You can download Unreal Engine 4.14 for free from its official website. We recommend that you study the huge list of new features and improvements to get yourself familiar with them (link above). In the meantime, don't hesitate to update your Unreal Engine installation, especially if you're using an older version. Newcomers will need to create a free account on the project's website to download the latest Unreal Engine release.
