14 DAY TRIAL // Epic Games, through Alexander Paschall, proudly announced today the general availability of Unreal Engine 4.15 game engine for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
Packed with almost 80 improvements that have been added by numerous contributors from all over the world during three months, Unreal Engine 4.15 is adding a lot of exciting new features, starting with support for the Nintendo Switch gaming console and continuing with faster C++ compile times, reduced by 50 percent.
"Unreal Engine 4.15 includes significant gains in overall stability, enhancements to developer workflows, and improvements to runtime performance resulting in greater efficiency during development and superior end user experiences after release," reads today's announcement.
New post-processing settings, improved texture streaming
Among other new features that have been implemented in Unreal Engine 4.15, we can mention the addition of extra film-like color and tone response to the tonemapper, various improvements to texture streaming to consume fewer resources, along with the ability for developers to package blueprints into native C++ code.
A new Background Blur widget is now available, as well as new reroute nodes in the Material Editor so you can better organize your Material graphs. Unreal Engine's Sequencer feature now supports weighted animation blending that allows game developers to create complex animation sequences (see it in action in the video below).
Unreal Engine 4.15 also ships with an experimental feature, namely a new Actor Sequence plugin that promises to let you embed Sequences into Actor Blueprints (watch the second and third videos attached to see it in action). Additional experimental features include content hot-reloading and HDR (High Dynamic Range) display output.
On the mobile part of things, Unreal Engine 4.15 improves the Mobile Preview feature with support for emulating the functionality of Android Vulkan, Android OpenGL ES 3.1, and iOS Metal devices. Support for Linux-powered ARM64 (AArch64) devices is now available, along with numerous other enhancements and bug fixes.
We recommend reading the full release notes if you want to familiarize yourself with the new features and changes introduced by Unreal Engine 4.15, a maintenance update that's available for download right now from its official website. Upgrade notes are also provided there for all supported platforms.
