Unreal Engine 4.25 Released

Today Epic Games released Unreal Engine 4.25, featuring next-gen platform support, so you can now develop games for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X using the engine.

Also, Unreal Engine’s Niagara visual effects system, used for Fortnite, is now production-ready with the latest release.

First, Unreal Engine 4.25 brings initial support for Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X and throughout the year the team will be updating the 4.25-Plus branch with optimizations, fixes, and certification requirements to support developers. The update supports new audio advancements, initial support for online subsystems, and early support for TRC and XR certification requirements.

As for Unreal Insights, the latest update offers UI improvements and introduces Networking Insights to "help developers optimize, analyze, and debug network traffic while cross-referencing against other types of data." Also, there's a new Animation Insights plugin that lets animators visualize gameplay state and live animation behavior while working in Unreal Editor.

As mentioned before, the Unreal Engine’s Niagara visual effects system is now production-ready and it now features a polished new UI, significant performance and stability improvements, plus some new features including an audio waveform data interface, particle-to-particle communication, and spatial hashing. 

As for Unreal Engine’s Chaos, the physics and destruction system now supports destruction, static mesh dynamics with collisions, cloth, hair, rigid-body skeletal control for items such as ponytails, and more. 

There's also a new physically based Thin Transparency shading model and a new Anisotropy material input property, plus improvements to the Clear Coat shading model.

There's more, of course, Learn all about Unreal Engine 4.25 here.