
Unreal Engine 4.15 Released - richardboegli
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-4-15-released
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lightedman
Still no diff patching support? I'm really sick of having to re-download 40
gigs every other day when an early-access game based on Unreal decides it
needs to update.

Seriously, diff patching has been a thing for decades and we're in the age of
artificially-restricted bandwidth allocation. If Unreal can't get with the
times, then Unreal needs to go away and make room for engines that bother to
use modern practices.

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trueSlav
There are no other better engines and what's more, there only two serious
competitors out there. CryEngine and Unity. CryEngine has nowhere near the
amount of documentation UE has (both official and unofficial) and investing
time into learning to work with CryEngine is questionable since the company
behind it may go bakrupt at any time and the skills you'll learn are not
really usable outside of your project(s) since pretty much no one in the
industry (except CIG and Warhorse) uses it. Unity is great for what it is, but
it's not exactly the best choice as far as ambitious projects go.

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Thaxll
For public engines yes, for private engine it's another story!

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AsyncAwait
Well, we're talking about public engines here, so you point is kind of
irrelevant.

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robeastham
* Monoscopic far field rendering for mobile VR.

Not sure how long this has been brewing, but I imagine it provides a
significant performance boost.

Anyone got any experience using it from the previews?

Great work Epic!

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mrfusion
What is it?

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hbosch
I believe it's when an object is so far in the distance that it doesn't
require stereo rendering, just render it once.

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mrfusion
What about the parallax effect though? Edit. I guess it would only apply in
cases where there is nothing in the foreground?

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pzone
The idea is that the parallax of two objects that are say 200 meters and 250
meters in the distance is negligible and can be ignored as long as you get the
parallax correct for nearby objects.

You might have to set your nearfield scale based on the contents of the scene.
It wouldn't work if there were say, some buildings at 200 meters and then
mountains a kilometer away. But if you're in a cathedral with some chandeliers
high up on the ceiling, cheating to remove the parallax of the chandeliers
will not detract from the VR effect.

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arca_vorago
This is a huge drop, great work Epic. I was excited enough to see the reduced
mem consumption, blend space and animation features, etc, and then I got to
the Linux patch notes and my jaw dropped, maybe I can finally get some work
done on my nix boxes and not have to keep using windows as much. (Mostly
crashes on certain screens like inability to bone edit, lack of launcher and
marketplace on Linux version, etc)

Compiling now

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mintplant
Maybe this is a good place to ask:

I have an Actor that rotates a child Static Mesh through a series of meshes
(via "Set Static Mesh") to display a number 0-30. When I preview or launch the
game, the mesh ends up rendering with some crummy-looking pixelation:

[https://www.spinda.net/files/pixelation2.PNG](https://www.spinda.net/files/pixelation2.PNG)

[https://www.spinda.net/files/pixelation1.PNG](https://www.spinda.net/files/pixelation1.PNG)

So far I've tried: ensuring Settings->Resolution Scale->Engine Scalability is
set to 100%; switching between Temporal AA, FXAA, and MSAA; disabling motion
blur; restarting the editor multiple times; create a whole new project from
the basic/minimal template and drop my object into an otherwise-empty scene.
Nothing's gotten rid of this jaggedness.

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cma
Sounds like texture streaming. There is a way to disable it on a per-asset
basis.

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mintplant
Thanks for the suggestion. I just tried disabling texture streaming globally
but unfortunately it didn't help. It's not a texture that's ending up
pixelated but rather the edges of the 3D model, as if it's being rendered at
some lower resolution and upscaled or anti-aliasing isn't being applied
properly.

Another example:
[https://i.imgur.com/tuvcAA8.png](https://i.imgur.com/tuvcAA8.png) \- FXAA is
turned on yet the edges are all jagged and pixelated.

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cma
Oh make sure your mesh has smoothing groups too, or you will be getting
aliasing on the specular on the internal polygons. Some of your edge artifacts
look like they may be that.

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mintplant
I have smoothing groups enabled in Blender's FBX export settings, so they
should be there. I can't find a way to tell if they've been imported correctly
from within UE4. The model is here, if you're willing to take a look at it:
[https://www.spinda.net/files/number6.fbx](https://www.spinda.net/files/number6.fbx)

I switched from Temporal AA to FXAA because it interacted oddly with the
changing Static Mesh. When it switched from one number mesh to the other, the
new one would jitter and sort of dissolve in until it settled out. I have
another object with a texture that rapidly changes, cycling through a set, and
Temporal AA causes ugly artifacting there which settles out once the texture
stops changing. (This happens both with texture streaming on and off.)

edit: video of what I'm talking about -
[https://www.spinda.net/files/temporal-
aa.mp4](https://www.spinda.net/files/temporal-aa.mp4)

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cma
Temporal AA can have issues with scrolling textures and stuff. I think there
is a setting on the material to disable temporal AA around that area, but it
may only be for translucency.

For a sort of flipbook mesh like that I could see it happening too. Not sure
what your best option is. You can change around some variables on how big the
temporal AA history filter is, but if you lower it enough to get rid of all
that ghosting you may end up as bad off as the 2xMSAA in terms of how much AA
you actually get out of it.

Your best bet may be trying a higher level of MSAA, r.MSAACount will control
the level of it. With really dense meshes it can begin having a high cost.

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mintplant
You were right about turning down Temporal AA ending up with worse results
than 2xMSAA. MSAA with r.MSAACount = 4 is a huge improvement, though:
[https://www.spinda.net/files/4x-msaa.mp4](https://www.spinda.net/files/4x-msaa.mp4)

Thanks for the help! I'll go forward with this for now and see if I run into
performance issues. Around how dense is "really dense"?

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cma
If you look at the quad complexity view and that will give you a good idea.
That will start getting red when your triangle edges are dense within a 4
screen pixel area and I think it will match up pretty close with the MSAA
costs.

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ksec
I am amazed, at the pace of Unreal Engine, the HUGE changelog and improvement
with every release and constantly shipping it in a very timely manner.

How is this even possible? Just trying to simply scroll through that page! Are
there any other Software that gets the huge list of improvement every few
months?

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richardboegli
It has support for Nintendo Switch

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idle_zealot
I'd hold off on excitement until 3rd party dev details are released.

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redtuesday
According to a recent video [1] some features from the new audio engine should
have made it into 4.15, but I can't see them mentioned in the release notes.
Didn't they make it in?

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8o2xQcrb_E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8o2xQcrb_E)

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redtuesday
Found the answer to my own question: They made it into 4.15 but since they are
experimental the features are not mentioned in the release notes. [1]

[1]
[https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?136947-4-15-R...](https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?136947-4-15-Released!&p=667538&viewfull=1#post667538)

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SurrealSoul
Good stuff, I always enjoy the way they present their patch notes; even as
someone with just the basics of unreal, it's always a good read.

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mrfusion
Any VR performance updates? (I made it halfway through )

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richardboegli
Ars Article: [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/unreal-
engine-4-15-sw...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/unreal-
engine-4-15-switch-hdr-sli-details/)

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dang
Thanks, we changed the URL to that from
[https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-
engine-4-15-release...](https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-
engine-4-15-released) because it seems to give more information. Can change it
back if people object.

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richardboegli
Please change it back.

Ars article is just a high level summary and some of their older articles,
where as the original article are the actual patch notes.

Thanks.

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dang
Ok, we did.

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kensai
What I really like about Unreal Engine is its Unreal Assets, ie all those
modifications that can be applied according to the field used. Good example:
UnityCar, the packet that was used to build "My Summer Car".

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shinymark
Are you confusing the Unity and Unreal engines perhaps?

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kensai
I am! Apologies.

