Epic games announced that is has released Unreal Engine 4.10 to the development community. The main priority for this version is to improve the stability of the SDK and repair as many bugs as it could. The company claimed that UE4.10 fixes hundreds of reported bugs found in previous versions, and UE4.10 includes support for the latest SDKs from all the supported target platforms, including the Oculus Rift and Mobile SDKs, Xbox One, Playstation 4 and PSVR, iOS and more.
Despite the priority being stability, Epic Games managed to include a number of improvements and new features to the game engine. UE4.10 now supports Refraction Effect For Mobile, with no extra work required. The company said that iPhone 5S and above, and Nexus 5, Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy S6 devices, will have this feature enabled, and they will automatically work with the shaders with refraction used on other platforms. It is possible to enable this feature on other phones by editing their Device Profile.
Unreal Engine 4.10 has updates for VR developers, as well. Optimized VR Rendering has been implemented specifically for developing for head mounted displays. Epic Games said the new "Hidden and Visible Mesh optimization" reduces GPU load by rendering only the pixels that will be displayed, and not those outside of the warped field of view. The first pass identifies the area the HMD wearer can't see, and the second pass omits this area, effectively boosting performance in VR.
Developers working from a Windows environment will have to update their Visual Studio software. UE4.10 has been updated to work with Visual Studio 2015. Epic Games said Visual Studio 2015 Community (which is a free download), Professional and Enterprise are supported. Visual Studio 2015 Express for Desktop is also supported, but with some limitations. The company said that Visual Studio 2013 will work, but you will have to compile the engine yourself to do this. The installer is only compatible with the latest version because of the need to keep the size of the distribution down. Epic Games also noted that support for Visual Studio 2013 will be abandoned in an upcoming release.
There are dozens more new features and improvements with the latest release, including 53 submitted to GitHub by the Unreal Development community. The full list of updates can be found on the Unreal Engine Blog. The Unreal Engine is available for free to anyone who wants it; simply sign up for a free account here. The company asks only for a percentage of sales once a product is successful.
Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years.
