14 DAY TRIAL // Epic Games' Alexander Paschall today announced the immediate availability of version 4.16 of the cross-platform and free Unreal Engine game engine for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Unreal Engine 4.16 comes more than three months after the previous update, version 4.15, and brings some exciting new animation and rendering features, notable performance improvements that would benefit console and mobile game developers, as well as a bunch of quality of life enhancements.
According to the release notes, Unreal Engine 4.16 introduces an amazing new Volumetric Fog feature that lets game developers enhance the mood of their game environments by automatically rendering realistic smoke and fog effects that offer consistent lighting on every inch of the scene, no matter its size.
"Create incredible ambiance and mood in your environments using the new Volumetric Fog," said Alexander Paschall. "Varying densities are supported so you can simulate clouds of dust or smoke flowing through light shafts, and any number of lights can affect the Volumetric Fog."
Nintendo Switch support now ready for production
Unreal Engine 4.16 also brings the ability to create physically-realistic bloom post-process effects thanks to the implementation of a new image-based (FFT) convolution feature, makes DirectX 12 default renderer for Xbox One, and improves the speed of the Garbage Collection functionality.
The Nintendo Switch support that was initially implemented earlier this year in the Unreal Engine 4.15 release is now fully-featured and ready for production in today's update, which includes more than 160 improvements. Optimizations were brought to Ray Traced Distance Field Shadows and Distance Field Ambient Occlusion, making them up to 30-50% faster.
Other goodies include new lightweight rigid body character and low-level clothing simulations, overhauled VR Mode UI, the ability to edit sequences and simulate physics actors in VR, HTML5 support for the WebGL 2 and WebAssembly technologies, kinematic bodies with simulated parents, and smart snapping in VR Mode.
Unreal Engine 4.16 provides support for the Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2017, Nintendo SDK 1.3.1, Xbox One October 2016 QFE3 XDK, PlayStation 4 PSR 4.508.001 SDK, Android 1R6u1, GoogleVR 1.3, GoogleVR SDK 1.40.0, and Vulkan SDK 1.0.39.1. You can download Unreal Engine 4.16 right now for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems from the official website.
