Unreal Engine 4.21 Preview Available

Epic Games has recently released the first preview of the upcoming Unreal 4.21 release. Let’s check out the list of updates and changes to see what’s new. 

Animation Updates:

• Animation Compression Updates. AnimCompression now uses a whitelist of optimal codecs to avoid trying permutations that are unlikely to be selected. 
• Animation Notify Improvements. Native Notifies have been added in Engine for dynamics and cloth management.
• Maintain Original Scale of Root Motion.
• Added Caching and Autocomplete for “Sync Market Names.
• Animation Sequence Framerate. Added animation sequence framerate to the Editor Viewport and Content Browser tooltip.
• Enable Auto Blend Out on Anim Montages. Anim Montages now have the option to enable or disable Auto Blend Out. This option is enabled by default.
• Live Animation Blueprint Recompilation is now non-experimental.
• CCDIK Skeletal Control Node. CCDIK Skeletal Control Node is now available within the AnimGraph of Animation Blueprints.
• Default Coordinate Space for Animation Editors is now Local Space
• Min LOD Notification.
• Skeletal Mesh: Set Master Pose Component Force Update

Audio Updates:

• Submix Envelope Follower (New Unreal Audio Engine Only). Users can now set an Envelope Follower Delegate on their Submixes allowing amplitude analysis of individual channels for that submix.
• New Sound Submix Effect: Filter. Users now have the option of adding a multimode filter to their Submixes allowing dynamic filter effects on a single Submix.
• Sound Submix Effect Reverb Dry Level. The Submix Effect Reverb now supports Parallel Wet and Dry Levels allowing users to dial in specific Wet/Dry ratios making the Effect usable as an Insert-Style Effect as well as a Send-Style Effect.
• Optimizations to Source Effect API. The Source Effect API has been optimized to process a full buffer of audio rather than frame-by-frame.

Core Updates:

• Cooker Performance. They have improved performance of the Unreal asset cooking process. The team has optimized various low-level code to eliminate unnecessary operations and refactored the handling of unsolicited assets in the CookOnTheFlyServer class so that it scales better.

Desktop Updates:

• Linux Platform Get Media Player. From 4.21 on, you can use bundled WebMMedia plugin to play back .webm VPX8/9 videos.
• Linux Crash Report Client Has a GUI. They’ve added support for the Crash Reporter GUI to now pop up when a crash occurs! This enables you to help make Linux better by quickly and easily reporting crashes that you encounter.

You can find the full list of updates here.