There’s a new version of Unreal Engine landing today, and it comes with a smorgasbord of new features designed to make life easier for game devs. For starters, the 4.16 update includes new rendering and animation systems, significant performance enhancements for mobile and console platforms, and fully-featured Switch support.
Hundreds of improvements have been made this time around, including 160 made by the dev community, but some are more notable than others. A new volumetric fog feature, for example, can be used to automatically render realistic fog and smoke effects with consistent lighting anywhere in a scene. The addition of dynamic lightweight rigid body and low level cloth simulation tools should also make it possible to create more realistic characters.
On a more practical level, tweaks have been been made to the interfaces of tools like VR Mode, Animation, and Sequences to further streamline the development process. But the icing on the cake takes the form of Switch support, with Unreal partnering up with Nintendo to release the full UE4 source code for Nintendo Switch to approved developers for free.
To learn more about the latest update, you can sift through the release notes over on the Unreal Engine blog.
