DirectX 12 and Vulkan support is now production-ready and available for everyone (both in the Editor and runtime)! The immediate effect is increased CPU performance.

We have added a new Raymarching mode for the Environment Probe light source. This is a far more advanced high-quality dynamic GI technique than any other solution used in UNIGINE before. This technology combined with the new spatial temporal denoiser is a huge step to a full-scale GI solution.

The new denoiser implementation deals much better with noise in reflections and diffuse lighting and at the same time it is smart enough to preserve illumination details. So, now we do not apply denoiser for each post-effect, instead we do it once for the whole resulting indirect specular and indirect diffuse buffers. This approach enables us to effectively remove noise for any GI technique such as SSRTGI, SSR, or even ray tracing.

• Switch to DirectX 12 can give up to 30% performance boost on the CPU side

• Multiple optimizations all over the engine

• Asynchronous GPU-to-CPU data transfer

• Improved asynchronous mesh streaming

• Better Landscape Terrain streaming

This release also brings improvements of asynchronous streaming performance for Landscape Terrain and reduction of performance spikes.

Productivity of the content creators is a critical factor for success of a project. That’s why we keep improving our toolset, adding new features and polishing the existing ones.

• Faster UnigineEditor startup

• Updated Texture Profiler and visualizers

• New Surface Profiler

• More advanced helpers

• Advanced filtering in Materials Hierarchy

• Cluster Paint Tool update

• Better focus and selection

• Improved dependency search and assets management

• Cleaner improvements

• Version Control System Plugin (SVN)

Photon is a popular networking engine and multiplayer platform that can handle all requests on their own servers. You can concentrate on implementing your application (gameplay) logic and features in your UNIGINE project, leaving the networking part to Photon, and create a sophisticated multiplayer networking solution. We have added a small sample demonstrating how to integrate the Photon engine into your UNIGINE project.

Studies confirm the high effectiveness of training in VR for many industries, and aviation is no exception. VR solutions are highly scalable compared to classic simulators. All interior equipment is represented within the virtual environment; trainees need only VR headsets and flight controls. To give you an ability to use features offered by the High-Level Image Generator (IG) Application Template for building VR-based simulators we have added a new IG+VR Template enabling you to automatically create a project with both VR and IG features. The work on this template has only started, and it only contains basic VR and IG logic at the moment, but we'll continue developing it in upcoming releases. The IG system is available only in the Sim edition of UNIGINE SDK.

Water Decals have been improved and now support black albedo color enabling you to create oil spills on water surface.

Water Decals now support the auxiliary buffer, enabling you to imitate local water temperature changes (cooling down or heating up, like in case of burning oil spills) and visualize them in thermal sensors.

Weather radar (aka WSR) used to monitor weather ahead of the aircraft (clouds and precipitation) is an integral part of a professional flight simulator enabling pilots to train strategic and tactical planning of a safe flight trajectory. Now it is available out-of-the-box implemented as a MeteoRadar component, a part of the IG Aviation add-on included in Sim SDK edition.

The radar works with 3D volumetric clouds generated by UNIGINE's advanced Clouds System ensuring consistency of radar readouts with the view from the aircraft cabin.

CIGI Symbols support has been extended to enable you to create and manage a wide range of Head-Up Displays (HUD) you need. This feature is available only in the Sim edition of UNIGINE SDK.

• Improved packages system

• Material graph editor updates

• Spacers and deflectors for particles

• GPU particles (experimental)

• Buffered input for joysticks and gamepads

• Updated Add-On Store

• New API samples (floating boats, tracked vehicles, input handling, etc.)

• And a huge list of other major improvements!

The full release notes are here.

Download UNIGINE SDK and start creating now!

Get UNIGINE