The Unreal Engine serves as the core for any number of games across PCs, consoles, and mobile phones alike. When a new version comes out, the changelog is big. Really, really big. Not all of the changes introduced in version 4.10 affect Android, but a solid number of them do. Here are some of the headline grabbers.
For starters, Unreal Engine 4.10 introduced support for Marshmallow. Check. Moving on, a new Material Quality system helps developers scale games to fit low-end and high-end devices. You can choose low, medium, and high quality versions of shaders for all materials, and you can selectively disable rendering to increase performance. The engine can automatically adjust to run optimally on many popular devices.
Compare the difference in a view displayed on a Galaxy S6 Edge with high quality materials (pictured above) versus an older Galaxy S III with the quality scaled down (below).
Refraction effects have made their way to mobile platforms. No extra effort is required on the part of the developer, as existing shaders with refraction will automatically work on phones and tablets. The shot below shows the effect at work in a sphere of floating water.
Unreal Engine 4.10 adds support for a number of gamepads. These controllers include the Amazon Fire game controller and TV remote, NVIDIA SHEILD controller and portable console, and the Samsung Game Pad EI-GP20. Mappings are detected automatically based on the name of the controller, and the engine can support multiple ones simultaneously.
If you need to display a web browser in-game for any reason, you now have that option on Android. You can spawn a web browser widget to display content hosted anywhere. An example use of this would be to display the latest news or events.
Other changes affect all platforms, like the ability to mirror landscapes. Think two-player competitive environments, and you’ll see how this could come in handy.
The massive changelog is far too long to share here, so dive in at the link below. And if you’re not a developer, well, just wait for updates to start rolling out to a few of your favorite games soon enough.
- Source:
- Unreal Engine