Hot on the heels of their GDC 2019 keynote, Epic Games have released Unreal Engine 4.22 as promised. The star of the show is support for real-time ray and path tracing, the first game engine to offer support for DXR and Nvidia’s new RTX graphics cards. Another major aspect of this release is on the C++ side, with a new license of Live++ to support improved hot-reloading of C++ code, as well as massive improvements to C++ build times. The Niagara particle system continues to improve, a new collaborative scene sharing mode has been added in experimental form and Visual Studio 2019 support was added, just a day after release!
Details of the release from the Unreal Engine blog:
Unreal Engine delivers unbridled power to build realistic worlds with the most accurate real-time lighting and shadowing effects – including dynamic global illumination, pixel perfect reflections and physically accurate refraction – thanks to real-time ray tracing on Nvidia RTX graphics cards. Soft area shadows and ambient occlusion provide the finishing touches to ground your scenes firmly in reality.
Our vast suite of virtual production features enables you to speed up your workflow on set with the ability to capture and record complex live performances and composite them in real-time. Entire teams can work in concert to orchestrate and direct scenes live using the new multi-user editing feature.
Every second spent waiting to see your latest creation come to life has a cost – a cost to you, a cost to your users, a cost to your vision – so we strive to make Unreal Engine easier and faster to go from iteration to iteration with each release so you can spend more time tweaking and polishing the experience for consumers. Live Coding brings Live++ support to Unreal Engine so you can go from idea to reality in seconds while you are running your project. Build times have been optimized across the board making iteration times for incremental builds up to 3x faster and freeing up valuable resources in your pipeline.
Be sure to check the release notes for more in-depth details of this release, or watch the video (coming soon) embedded below.