What's new in Unreal Engine 4.19?

The highly anticipated Unreal Engine 4.19 is now generally available. This release hosts a new Live Link plugin, improvements to Sequencer, new Dynamic Resolution feature, and multiple workflow and usability improvements.

In addition to all of these major updates, this release also features a massive 128 improvements based on queries submitted by the Unreal Engine developers community on GitHub.

Unreal Engine 4.19 allows game developers to know exactly what their finished game will look like at every step of the development process. This update comes with three major goals:

1. Let developers step inside the creative process.
2. Build gaming worlds that run faster than ever before.
3. Give developers full control.

Here's a list of all the major features and what they bring to the game development process:

New Unreal Engine 4.19 features

Live Link Plugin Improvements

The Maya Live Link Plugin is now available and can be used to establish a connection between Maya and UE4 to preview changes in real-time. Virtual Subjects are added to the Live Link. It can also be used with Motion Controllers. Live Link Sources can now define their own custom settings. Virtual Initialization function and Update DeltaTime parameter are also added to Live Link Retargeter API.

Source: Unreal Engine blog

Unified Unreal AR framework

The Unreal Augmented Reality Framework provides a unified framework for building Augmented Reality (AR) apps for both Apple and Google handheld platforms using a single code path. Features include functions supporting Alignment, Light Estimation, Pinning, Session State, Trace Results, and Tracking.

Temporal upsampling

The new upscaling method, Temporal Upsample performs two separate screen percentages used for upscaling:

• Primary screen percentage that by default will use the spatial upscale pass as before;
• Secondary screen percentage that is a static, spatial only upscale at the very end of post-processing, before the UI draws.

Dynamic resolution

Dynamic Resolution adjusts the resolution to achieve the desired frame rate, for games on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It uses a heuristic to set the primary screen percentage based on the previous frames GPU workload.

Source: Unreal Engine blog

Physical light units

All light units are now defined using physically based units. The new light unit property can be edited per light, changing how the engine interprets the intensity property when doing lighting related computations.

Source: Unreal Engine blog

Landscape rendering optimization

The Landscape level of detail (LOD) system now uses screen size to determine detail for a component, similar to how the Static Mesh LOD system works.

Starting from this release, all existing UE4 content that supports SteamVR is now compatible with HTC's newly-announced Vive Pro.

These are just a select few updates to the Unreal Engine. The full list of release notes is available on the Unreal Engine forums.