Unreal Engine 4.8 Released With SteamVR And PlayStation Morpheus VR Support

When I first learned that Unreal Engine came out with its 4.8 release this week, I figured that it was a modest update. After all, 4.7 was released in February, so there hasn't exactly been much time to pack that much in. Well, if you have my kind of thinking, I'd highly encourage you to click the link below and peruse 4.8's release notes - the page just seems to go on forever.

UE's developers say that 189 "great" changes were made in this release, with a major focus being on stability of the editor. That being the case, many bugs have been squashed, but despite that, the team still managed to get a slew of new features baked-in.

At the top is support for some upcoming VR products; SteamVR/HTC Vive, and PlayStation 4 Morpheus. On the Vive side, a new "VR Preview" has been added for instant previews of your work, while for Morpheus, both the 60Hz and 120Hz kits are now supported.

On the features side, a new grass renderer has been added that can dynamically render grass and other "ground clutter" around the player and remove it when it's no longer in range. There's also a procedural foliage generator that has a similar goal except the objects created would become a static part of the scene.

Also new and notable with this release are scrubbable network replays, HQ depth of field and tone mapping, dynamic navigation mesh, screen-space reflections for translucent surfaces, revamped editors, and much, much more. If you're a UE user, you'll definitely want to clear some time from your schedule and peruse the release notes.