Enlighten 3.05 enhances mobile scaling for Unreal devs

Geomerics has announced the latest point-release for its dynamic lighting middleware is now shipping, with the newest features targeted at mobile developers using Unreal Engine.

Enlighten 3.05 makes several changes to the tool’s Unreal integration to help these devs “achieve the desired performance balance on mobile”.

Key features include a more efficient surface relighting model that requires less computing time to render, and the introduction of cubemaps, which capture indirect lighting changes in real-time reflections.

There are also improvements to the firm’s Forge tool, such as custom shaders, and a new precompute loader API that simplifies integrating Enlighten into developers’ own game engines.

“Most mobile gamers own a phone that costs less than $350 to purchase,” the team wrote in a blog post. “These devices come with previous generation processor technology, previous generation API support or fewer cores and are less able to run high end gaming content.

“Enlighten has long been able to compute dynamic global illumination on mobile devices. The challenge is now to enable it on all smartphones and tablets, so that game developers can use it in the knowledge that a broad spectrum of their target market will experience the benefit of this technology.”