14 DAY TRIAL // Epic Games released a new maintenance update for its Unreal Engine cross-platform and free game engine, versioned 4.18, which brings dozens of new features and improvements, as well as support for new platforms.
Prominent new features of the Unreal Engine 4.18 release include Volumetric Lightmaps to enable high-quality lighting on movable objects, multi-bounce indirect lighting from Skylights, new Media Framework features for real-time compositing, and support for Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore augmented reality frameworks.
Additionally, WebAssembly is now enabled by default for all your HTML5 projects to allow you to develop complex games for the Web, a new global "Find in Blueprints" search functionality so you can quickly find your stud in multiple Blueprints, and there is a new Physics Asset Editor and advanced Material Editor preview support.
"Unreal Engine 4.18 gives you the tools to deliver the types of content users demand," said Jeff Wilson in the release notes. "In our relentless pursuit of a more efficient and streamlined development process, we continue to make updates and improvements to all of our tools so that you can deliver content faster than ever before."
Apple's macOS High Sierra 10.13 operating system fully supported
Unreal Engine 4.18 brings good news for game developers that use Mac computers, as it fully supports Apple's macOS High Sierra 10.13 operating system, along with the Xcode 9.0 IDE. The SDKs for iOS and tvOS were updated as well, and there's now support for SteamVR and Steam 1.39, Android NDK 12b, and Visual Studio 2015 Update 3.
With this release, devs can now use Visual Studio Code on Windows, Mac, and GNU/Linux platforms if they select it as their preferred IDE (Integrated Development Environment) from the Editor preferences dialog, but it will require you to install .NET Core 2.0 or Mono, depending on the operating system.
Other noteworthy features of the Unreal Engine 4.18 release include simplified iOS certificates and signing, the experimental desktop-class forward renderer for iOS 10.3 or later, Gradle by default for Android, a new Android Camera plugin, LLM (Low Level Memory) tracker, and better XGE shader compiler support.
You can study the full release notes of Unreal Engine 4.18 in the official announcement, from where you can also download the new build for GNU/Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows systems. We recommend updating to this version as soon as possible to enjoy the best features for writing games with the UE4 game engine.
