14 DAY TRIAL // Epic Games is preparing to release a major update for the Unreal Engine, and the developers have shared the first 4.11 Preview version so that anyone can give it a go and offer some feedback on what's happening.
The Unreal Engine in one of the best gaming engines with support for the Linux platforms and it's nice to see that Epic Game continues to provide support. Porting Unreal-powered games to Linux is now a lot simpler, and the studio itself is working on a new Unreal Tournament game that uses this precise technology.
Epic Games figured out pretty early that there is a Linux market for games. Some of the older gamers will remember that Unreal Tournament 2004 was running natively on Linux, years before the open source platform became the home for SteamOS and Steam for Linux.
Unreal Engine 4.11 Preview is ready for testing
The new version of the engine is still under heavy development, and devs have been advised not to convert their projects for active development on preview releases, although that should be clear enough.
"A Preview of the upcoming 4.11 release is now available via the Epic Games Launcher and GitHub. We have made this Preview available so that our developer-community can help us catch issues before the final release. As fixes are implemented, we will release updated previews throughout the development cycle. Please be aware that the preview releases are not fully quality tested," developers wrote on the official forums.
According to the changelog, a number of rendering updates have been implemented (eyes, hair, fabrics, and more), support for very soft indirect shadows cast by a capsule representation of the character has been added, some landscape and foliage updates have been added as well, DirectX12 improvements have been made, and lots of other features have landed as well.
Epic Games hasn't given a launch date for this new update, but they did mention that it will take a while until it becomes stable.