Unreal Engine 4.16 was released

Epic Games company in the blog of the Unreal Engine game engine announced the release of its new version – 4.16. One of the key features of the update was support for Nintendo Switch.

Now UE developers can build and release games for the new Nintendo platform, which sold 2.7 million copies only in the first month of sales.

In addition, Unreal Engine 4.16 has added support for volumetric fog. This link contains documentation on it, and the screenshot below shows how cool it looks.

Image convolution based on the algorithm for fast calculation of discrete Fourier transform for Bloom (Image-Based (FFT) Convolution for Bloom) appeared to create the videos. As we understood, thanks to the innovation, artists have gained full control over the intensity of blurring.

The update also optimized the operation of distance maps for lighting (Distance Field Lighting). Scenes with realistic ambient lighting and terrain shadows on dynamic meshes received a serious increase in performance – by 30-50%.

Besides it:

• VR mode has a new interface in the engine (now you can even mount videos in it);
• since DirectX 12 has become the default Xbox One renderer, UE has worked on optimizing the engine for the component;
• HTML5 support for WebAssembly and WebGL 2 has been added.

The full list of innovations is here.

Source: Epic Games