Unreal Engine 4.12 Released With Mobile Vulkan, Improved VR, Better Reflections

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Unreal Engine 4.12 Released With Mobile Vulkan, Improved VR, Better Reflections

The latest version of Unreal Engine 4 is now available to game developers...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Unreal-Engine-4.12-Released

[haagch]

- OSVR AR/VR support.

Interesting, it's under a Experimental/ directory. Even the earliest of the Oculus SDK plugins directly under Plugins/. Maybe they have introduced the Experimental thing recently? Or maybe they just have a closer relationship with proprietary VR vendors.

https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealE...R/OSVR.uplugin

"WhitelistPlatforms": [ "Win64" ]

Why, OSVR, why? Why put a windows-only plugin into a cross platform engine when you support multiple platforms yourself?

Edit: Nice git usage: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealE...1a3c11f2540495
Showing 726 changed files with 14,862 additions and 2,315 deletions.

[schmidtbag]

Why, OSVR, why? Why put a windows-only plugin into a cross platform engine when you support multiple platforms yourself?

Right now they're prioritizing getting OSVR to run properly in Windows. There is still much room for improvement. Hell, I can't even get the software to build in Debian using the shell script they provided. Until SteamVR supports Linux, I don't suspect the OSVR devs are going to put much effort into Linux. It's a little disappointing - I wish I knew about this before getting one. I'm also pretty irritated how so many SteamVR titles require those special hand controllers.

[jf33]

Various logging/crash improvements for UE4 on Linux

Is this related to the compute shader difficulties with unreal engine based apps in mesa?

[smitty3268]

Is this related to the compute shader difficulties with unreal engine based apps in mesa?

Doubtful that is referring to shaders at all. And what compute shader difficulties?

[VikingGe]

There is or was a bug somewhere that prevented compute shaders from being compiled properly, or something like that, which is why RadeonSI did not advertise GL 4.3 even when all the extensions were finally implemented. Not sure if anything has changed by now.

[smitty3268]

There is or was a bug somewhere that prevented compute shaders from being compiled properly, or something like that, which is why RadeonSI did not advertise GL 4.3 even when all the extensions were finally implemented. Not sure if anything has changed by now.

Pretty sure that bug popped up when linking together geometry and vertex shaders, nothing to do with compute shaders. Anyway, that's been fixed as of Mesa 12.0.