Unreal Engine 4.9 Released

An enormous update to Unreal Engine 4 has been released. With it comes improvements to mobile platform, VR upgrades, Direct X 12 support and much more.

Hundreds of updates have come with the new release of Unreal Engine 4.9, and 129 of these improvements are contributed by the community of Unreal Engine Developers on GitHub.
Updates include: 

Improvements to Android and iOS Platform Support

With new additions such as, movable lights and decals for mobile projects, and efficient dynamic shadows. Majority of the mobile upgrades applies to HTML5 development as well.

The iOS In-App Purchase Function has been improved which includes Remote Push Notifications and Support for CloudKit. Android now has an OpenGL ES 3.1, Immersive Mode Support, asynchronous audio decompression, and greater orientation features.

VR Motion Controller Support

Through one single unified interface, motion controller devices will be available through a common interface. Currently, HTC Vive is SteamVR input is supported and soon PlayStation Move, Oculus Rift, and others will be as well.

The Motion Controller key abstraction will allow input button presses and triggers to be routed to a single player from multiple controllers. Motion tracking can also be added to a project by adding the Motion Controller Component to your character, which will automatically update anything attached to it to follow the position of controllers.

Full Scene Particle Collision with Mesh Distance Fields

Particles now collide with entire scenes whereas previously, collision only applied to what was viewed on screen. This can be used with various effects like sparks colliding with surfaces and snow that accumulates on surfaces.

Character Control Plugin

The new “ArchVisCharacter” plugin adds a character class that provides out-of-the-box controls appropriate for architectural visualization applications. It allows for smoother videos and live demos of architectural visualizations.

DirectX 12 Support

As an experimental new feature, DirectX 12 is now supported. DirectX 12 offers an even lower-level rendering API that has greater efficiency and lets rendering commands be submitted in parallel across many threads. The support will continue to be improved.

Unreal Engine 4 Documentation

Documentation pages now have filtering for skill level, engine version, and category tags displayed on the top and bottom of pages that lets you find other pages with matching tags.

These are just a few of the updates so remember to check out the rest of the amazing updates that have come out for Unreal Engine 4.9.