Okay so I only had one shot at that joke… and I’ma gonna take it.
Epic Games has just pushed their 21st release of Unreal Engine 4 since it launched to the public back in March 2014. A lot has changed since then… including one feature that has been lurking pretty much since the beginning: Niagara, the new visual effects editor, is finally available in Early Access!
When I say it is near the beginning – I mean it. Here’s a forum post from about four-and-a-half months after 4.0 launched where some users dug it up with some INI-file changes. The idea is that it will replace Cascade, which has been hanging around since Unreal Engine 3, as the default particle and effects editor. It’s a bit more than I can go into in a news post, but you will want to check out Epic’s GDC 2018 talk to see a ~45-minute demo of the new module. Basically, it’s a visual scripting system for the particle effects, but that doesn’t really explain it too well.
Another major upgrade is that Unreal Engine 4.20 finally uses the C++ compiler that is available in Visual Studio 2017. Previously, to use Visual Studio 2017, users would need to build with the 2015 toolchain. Support for C++ and its standard library is pretty good in Visual Studio 2015 but being able to use the latest features if you want to is always a plus.
Also, Epic is now pushing some of their development branches to GitHub. This allows you to keep up with a specific branch of features, especially if you are the type of studio that maintains their own engine fork and wants to cherry pick certain commits.
As always, Unreal Engine 4 is free to download and use. Royalties do apply for most works created with the engine, based on a small percentage of revenue, but the engine, itself, is free.
Blaze it
Blaze it
Indeed. It’s probably very
Indeed. It's probably very useful for fire effects.
What’s up with the Phoronix
What’s up with the Phoronix website lately I go there and it’s like I’m doing a Blender CPU render! How can any website need 15-27% of a quad core 8 thread processor just to display the webpage. I don’t want to use ad blockers but that’s just too much processr cycles.
Is high CPU usage on a website an indicator of mining scripts and is there a way in in modern browser to specifically limit the amount of CPU cycles made available to ads.