CARY, NC — Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 4.16, which includes new rendering and animation features, significant performance improvements for mobile and console platforms, and tons of quality of life enhancements designed to make it easier to create stunning environments and engaging experiences that run smoothly on a wider variety of platforms.
The new Volumetric Fog feature allows users to enhance the mood of their environments, which can be enabled to automatically render realistic fog and smoke effects with consistent lighting anywhere in a scene, even at a large scale.
Characters can see new life thanks to new dynamic, lightweight rigid body and low level cloth simulation tools. Users can apply greater control of the flow of movement using animation modifiers, spline IK solver, updated Pose Driver, and many other improvements to the animation system.
Garbage Collection is now twice as fast. UI rendering performance and UMG widget creation speed are vastly improved to enable users to create more compelling interfaces. Interfaces and workflows for VR mode, animation, sequencer, and other tools have been updated to make the development process more streamlined.
Support for Nintendo Switch is fully-featured and ready for production in 4.16. Epic Games has teamed up with Nintendo to release the full UE4 source code for Nintendo Switch to approved developers for free (https://developer.nintendo.com).
DirectX 12 is now the default renderer for Xbox One, bringing both performance and feature enhancements to platform support in the engine. In addition, users can now develop HTML5 games using WebAssembly and WebGL 2.
For mobile, the Android virtual keyboard is now supported, and runtime permissions have been exposed to both Blueprint and code. In addition to hundreds of updates shipping from Epic, this release includes 160 improvements submitted by the community of Unreal Engine developers on GitHub.