Unreal Engine 4.18 Gets Early Access for VR in macOS

Now Mac can also has the full VR experience, Unreal Engine 4.18 has just released on  macOS, now all of Mac users can downloaded Unreal Engine.

During the 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple announced Metal 2, the second version of the graphics API. Metal 2 includes support for VR content creation, and Apple said Valve, Unity, and Unreal would bring their VR tools to the Mac.

Apple unveiled the new macOS High Sierra operating system in the 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in the middle of the year. And for the first time, it has demonstrated its achievements in VR, meanwhile, it also announced that the new operating system will be able to support external video card functions through the universal lightning 3 interface, in order to enable the official to support the external graphics card function. Additional graphics processing capabilities make it possible for a Mac to have a well VR experience even without an independent graphics card and a lightning 3 interface.

 New Features in Unreal Engine 4.18

Although Apple announced the official support of external graphics will have to wait until the beginning of 2018, but we already saw some exciting news, new unreal engine has full support to the Apple ecosystem.

Today, Epic Games officially released the latest version of the game development Unreal Engine 4.18, including “Hundreds of updates” and 98 improvements submitted by the development community. New features include Volumetric Lightmaps, Skylights and brand new Media Framework function. Media Framework now has already supported Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore. Developers have been able to call iOS 11 in the Arkit, with support for multiple platforms such as the VR and OS versions: including the new Oculus SDK 1.17, SteamVR 1.39, Masos, and Sierra.

Mac VR support, along with full Metal 2 features will ship in Unreal Engine 4.18. You can expect previews to arrive in September and a full release is in early October.
The new game engine also includes the support to original SteamVR, making it’s available on Mac to use same perfect PC interface, and also increasing the ability to easily transfer projects between two platforms. That means, the number of VR games on the Mac will be almost staying the seam to the PC platform after update.

Although Apple’s VR started relatively late, the momentum of its catch-up can be said to be quite strong from now on.