14 DAY TRIAL // Unreal Engine 4.8 has been officially released earlier today for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
Prominent features of Unreal Engine 4.8 include grass rendering and procedural foliage systems, plugins available in marketplace, post-processing enhancements and utilities, multiplatform VR (Virtual Reality) support, network replays, and asset size mapper.
However, in this article we will inform you about the new features introduced for the Linux platform in this important milestone of one of the most popular and powerful game engines ever created.
According to the attached changelog, Unreal Engine 4.8 brings improved control over texture streaming via available GPU memory size, support for creating code projects without requiring an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), and support for minimizing or maximizing windows when double-clicking on the titlebar.
Support for multiple OpenAL devices and contexts has been added in the Linux audio system, the LinuxNativeDialogs has been modified to automatically detect the current desktop environment and activate the right widget toolkit, which can be either GTK+ or Qt, and the software will now output compiler errors in GCC-like format.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Nvidia drivers are now better supported
Unreal Engine 4.8 also adds better support for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system, as users are no longer required to build third-party libraries locally, support for SpeedTree has been added, and multiple issues with the Nvidia video drivers have now been repaired.
The software is also capable of loading Steam shared objects dynamically, it can generate targets for projects in a different directory than the one of the engine, it now uses RTLD_GLOBAL (the global symbol resolution) when attempting to load shared objects, and adds support for OpenGL 2.1 to its standalone tools and programs.
Last but not least, Unreal Engine 4.8 now uses an updated SDL2 library from the icculus branch created by Ryan Gordon, it enables the convex decomposition library (V-HACD) for Linux systems, and adds the ability to drag and drop text and assets from external apps to the Unreal Editor. Download Unreal Engine 4.8.