UE5.6 Zen Updates 🚀, Unity Automation Tests ⚙️, Apple Silicon Vulkan 🍎
Code Quality and Testing 🧪
Kill Unity Code Smells: Refactors for Switches, Shotgun Surgery, and More
This hands-on Unity tutorial tackles four notorious code smells—Shotgun Surgery, Switch Statements, Temporary Field, and Refused Bequest—with step-by-step refactors. See how to extract classes and interfaces, apply Null Object, replace conditionals with polymorphism, and favor composition over inheritance. Real C# examples show how to create single sources of truth (like a cached CritPolicy) and simplify Player/Enemy scripts. You’ll also pick up practical IDE tips using extract, change signature, and safe rename.
Beating Flaky Mobile Game Tests: Transition/Perform/Save and the Reassurance Pattern
Automating Unity mobile UI tests is notoriously flaky due to animations, device variance, and rapid iteration. This talk introduces a practical framework: extend Arrange-Act-Assert with Act split into Transition, Perform, and Save, and add a “reassurance pattern” that verifies effects and retries safely. It explains why Page Objects alone fall short, reviews tools like AltTester and Firebase Test Lab, and shows early AI assists—LLM-guided locator repairs and paths to custom ML pipelines.
Unreal Engine 5 Tools & Workflow 🚀
Paint, animate, and storyboard 2D inside UE: Odyssey plugin goes free
Odyssey (ODC) returns to Unreal as a free plugin on Fab, bringing a complete 2D toolset—storyboarding, vector/raster animation, and painting—natively to UE on Windows and Mac. See 2D-in-3D workflows in action: attach animated planes to cameras, paint post-process rain, control hue/emissive via Sequencer, and even paint normals on meshes. For complex materials, a media track + media texture pipeline keeps edits non-destructive. A new vector Inbetweener tool speeds smooth motion with trajectory and spacing charts.
UE 5.6: Faster Iteration with Zen Streaming, Snapshots, and Incremental Cook
Unreal Engine 5.6 overhauls iteration speed end-to-end. Zen Streaming (beta) skips staging/deployment and streams cooked data on demand—Fortnite saw ~25 minutes saved per on-target run. Combine Cook Snapshots, Multiprocess Cook, and the default Zen cooked output store for big wins, with Studio Telemetry tracking regressions. A redesigned Project Launcher puts Zen Streaming and Incremental Cook (experimental) in an artist-friendly UI.
Art & Graphics Tech 🎨
From ZBrush to Lumen: A Modular Armor Character Pipeline
3D artist Aitziber Azkue shares a production-ready pipeline for a modular medieval character in UE5. Learn how she preserves MetaHuman facial animation with edge-flow and vertex-order safeguards, crafts armor and cloth fully in ZBrush, and achieves crisp embroidery using planes and height maps. She details UV/baking organization, modular texturing with packed maps, and practical Lumen settings—plus candid advice for staying motivated.
Vulkan on Apple Levels Up: KosmicKrisp Nears 1.3 Conformance
LunarG unveiled KosmicKrisp, a Mesa-based Vulkan driver for Apple Silicon that’s already nearing Vulkan 1.3 conformance. Early results show it powering demos and the Android Emulator, with Google voicing support. LunarG plans to upstream to Mesa and ship a macOS SDK bundling KosmicKrisp and MoltenVK. Get details and a live look at the Khronos BOF during SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver.