Unreal Engine 4.2 introduces vehicles, camera animation and free samples

Work continues on Epic Games’ latest iteration of the powerful Unreal Engine with the 4.2 update adding vehicles, camera animations and more.

The new features included in the update were revealed via the Unreal Engine Twitch feed and posted on the tech’s official site.

One of the major addition is full support of vehicles, encompassing four-wheel drive, front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive vehicles. While the default drive train simulations assumes a vehicle has 4 wheels, any number of wheels will work.

There is even an automobile template to get developers starting on making their own cars or other forms of transportation. To demonstrate how vehicles work in Unreal Engine 4, a sample vehicle game based around off-road racing will be made available for free on the UE Marketplace when 4.2 goes live.

Also on the Marketplace will be a sample of stylised rendering, showcasing the flexibility of Epic’s new engine. This will also be free.

Meanwhile support for camera animations has also been added to the development platform. Building on the CameraAnims established in UE3, UE4 expands on the system with Blueprint support and the ability to use up to eight animations at once.

You can find a full list of the new additions, which also include user-defined Blueprint structures and animation debug features, at www.unrealengine.com.

Unreal Engine was launched back in March, with Epic Games announcing the development platform would be available for just $19 per month.