Unreal Engine 4.16 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

May 25, 2017

Epic Games’ Latest Unreal Dev Grants Include 7 VR Studios

Epic Games’ Unreal Dev Grants began back in 2016 as a $5 million USD initiative awarding developers with funding for contributions to the Unreal Engine community. In this latest round, 17 projects have received a total of $275,000, seven of which are virtual reality (VR) related.

The projects cover a range of genres – mostly videogames – with film and community support also included. Ape Law’s psychological horror title Albino Lullaby is the first on the list. The first episode arrived for HTC Vive last year, with Oculus Rift support added afterwards. Episode two is scheduled to release later this year.

The Soulkeeper VR

Cooperative Innovations’ Raiders of Erda is a VR role-playing game (RPG) experience that was announced earlier this year. The videogame features a complex combat system and an alpha is expected in 2017.

The Soulkeeper VR by Helm Systems is an episodic dark fantasy RPG that’s due to arrive on Steam Early Access. It will offer a variety of combat styles and mechanics, including melee, spell casting, combat with staff and ranged.

From New Reality Co comes Tree, a VR experience shown at VRLA, the Tribeca Film Festival, and Cannes that uses sight, sound, touch and smell to explore the lifecycle of a rainforest tree from a seedling to full-grown state to unfortunate human consumption.

A studio to be directly award is New Zealand-based realityvirtual.co. The company specialises in new media, including drone UAV cinematography and VR, with its most recent project MANA VR currently touring several events.

Lastly there’s MGS Studios, a developer behind the creation of several Robo Recall mods, such as a locomotion mod that changes how the game is played and a Star Wars mod.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of the Unreal Dev Grants, reporting back with the latest VR recipients.

May 24, 2017

Epic Games Advances VR Integration for Unreal Engine Releasing v4.16

Last month Epic Games rolled out the first preview for the next iteration of its Unreal Engine software, version 4.16. Since then smaller previews have been released, giving developers a chance to experiment with some of the new features. Today, those new additions are fully implemented with Unreal Engine 4.16 now available.

As VRFocus has previously reported, virtual reality (VR) has played a big part in the latest version’s development, with the VR Mode seeing several extensive additions to make creating a VR videogame in VR even easier. It’s been overhauled to provide a more intuitive workflow and editing experience with a new asymmetrical controller setup putting an improved Radial Menu on one hand and an interaction laser with improved precision on the other. The controllers are now Asynchronous on both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Unreal Engine RadialMenu_002

Then there’s the Sequencer cinematics editor which now supports VR. This will allow developers to create a new sequence, move objects around, which automatically creates sequence keys for the transformations. Thus users will be able to make sequences and play them back, whilst never leaving VR. Additionally, existing Level Sequences can be opened and played from the Sequencer UI or the Radial Menu.

VR developers will now have smart snapping available, which uses the bounds of an object to align to other actors in the scene for easy placement. Physics Actors in VR Mode can now be simulated. Users run a physical simulation to get a realistic scattering or simply knock Actors around with the motion controllers.

There are several early access additions to Unreal Engine 4.16 as well. The new Unreal Audio Engine and Steam Audio SDK will be available, with the former introducing new features such as a submix graph, submix effects, source effects, real-time synthesis, and better audio plugin support. While the latter will bring next-gen physics-based audio experiences to compliment Unreal Audio Engine.

On top of all that, an early access preview of social screens for PlayStation VR, provides support for Social Screen separate mode, where the the Monitor and HMD display different things at 30fps output.

There’s a massive amount of info to go through for Unreal Engine 4.16, so head to the forums for an in depth look. As always VRFocus will bring you the latest Unreal Engine announcements as they happen.

April 27, 2017

Epic Games Roll Out the First Preview for Unreal Engine 4.16

You don’t have to be a developer to have heard of Epic Games and Unreal Engine. The studio is well known for titles such as Paragon or its recently released virtual reality (VR) project Robo Recall. Both of which have been created using Unreal Engine as well numerous other videogames by developers around the world. This week the company released a preview of the engine’s next update, 4.16, so that studio’s can start experimenting with the new features and report any issues.

Epic Games continue to advance the VR side of the engine, adding several new tool updates like the VR Mode’s UI and interaction, access to the Sequencer Editor, Smart Snapping and physics simulation.

UnrealEngine-4-14-preview-1

The studio hasn’t stopped there either. ‘Unified Console Commands across VR platforms,’ means that there is now a shared layer for common interfaces that developers can work from, rather than separate ones for each platform, and the mobile multiview path now supports Gear VR.

Back in February Valve launched the Steam Audio SDK as a free beta for developers. The SDK included a range of features such as HRTF-based binaural rendering, occlusion, physics-based reverb, real-time sound propagation and baked reverb and propagation to enhance VR applications. With Unreal Engine 4.16 Preview 1, Epic Games has fully-integrated the Steam Audio SDK whilst utilising the capabilities of the new Unreal Audio Engine.

As with any preview this is just for developers to test and experiment with. Epic Games always states: “Please be aware that the preview releases are not fully quality tested, that they are still under heavy active development, and that they should be considered as unstable until the final release. Developers should not convert their projects for active development on preview releases.”

For the full summary of updates head to the Unreal Engine forums. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Epic Games and Unreal Engine, reporting back with the latest updates.