UE5 Destruction Tips 💥, Substance Sampler 5.1 🌍, Activision vGPU CI/CD 🧪
Unreal Engine Power-Ups 🔥
Faster, Better Breaks: UE5.5 Chaos Destruction Tips from GDC
Get the latest UE5.5 Chaos Destruction tactics from GDC 2025 to keep framerate high and destruction satisfying. Enable Nanite post‑fracture, use root proxies with ISM, and manage sim cost with Remove on Break, one‑way debris, and breaks‑per‑frame caps. Swap heavy fields for Apply External Strain on weapon hits, and pipe Chaos events into Niagara via Data Channels for efficient FX. Plus: anchoring in Fracture Mode, damage propagation, tiny‑geo cleanup, and self‑assembling build effects.
Build Massive UE5 Worlds Faster with New Procedural Generator
3D Artist Gökhan Karadayı has released a Procedural World Generator for UE5 built on the user-friendly Landscape Layer system. It streamlines environment creation with houses, roads, railways, traffic signs, electricity poles, and barriers. The roadmap teases new ecosystems (tropical, arid, oak/broadleaf), seasonal variants, more props, maps, and landscape patches. Positioned as a large, evolving package, it’s a strong pick for rapid world-building in UE5.
Shipping Big in Unreal: Production-Proven Tips from Epic’s Chris Murphy
Epic’s Chris Murphy shares pragmatic fixes for AAA Unreal projects: disable risky defaults, avoid first-frame animation hitches, and lean on GAS/CMC instead of reinventing systems. He details grid strategy with Loose Hierarchical Grid, PCG hierarchical generation, and Mass-powered Instance Actors to tame streaming. Learn to use PSO pre-caching to squash first-run hitches, in-editor source control and Review Tool for safer iteration, and Data Validation/Interchange to keep pipelines clean.
Dev Tools & Pipelines 🧰
Dear ImGui v1.92.2: Smarter Tabs, Backend Fixes, Vulkan Patch
Dear ImGui v1.92.2 arrives as a focused maintenance release with a smarter tab bar: a new mixed fitting policy shrinks tabs before enabling scroll, plus new style controls for fine-tuning widths. Backends get important updates, including a breaking SDL_GPU change (ImTextureID → SDL_GPUTexture*), a Vulkan texture corruption fix, and OpenGL texture upload tweaks. Expect navigation, tables, fonts, and hover consistency fixes, a new SDL3+Metal example, and improved docking/viewport focus behavior.
Sampler 5.1: Better Tiling, Cleaner Scans, Faster Material Workflows
Adobe’s Substance 3D Sampler 5.1 introduces Auto Tiling to isolate the smallest seamless tile—especially great for textiles. Scan cleanup improves with reduced color bleeding, enhanced Clone Stamp blending, and automatic fold removal. A new Flatten layer speeds performance by baking stacks into a single set of maps. Studio mode now adds Roughness generation and automatic physical size detection for accurate digital twins with HP Z Captis.
Ops at Scale: QA & Live Ops ⚙️
250K Daily Tasks: Inside Activision’s vGPU-Powered Test Platform
Activision reengineered its global CI/CD for Call of Duty with NVIDIA vGPU, scaling Compass to 250,000+ daily tasks for 3,000 developers. High‑density virtualization (4–24 VMs/server) and flexible GPU partitioning now power automated visual/performance testing and heavy offline compiles across 3–5k nodes. The overhaul cut racks from ~100 to six and reduced power and cooling by 72–73%. Next up: RDMA and ConnectX to push build throughput even further.
How Magic Jigsaw Puzzles Stays Fresh After 14 Years
ZiMAD’s Magic Jigsaw Puzzles keeps its core mechanics intact while layering optional live ops—events, missions, calendars—to boost retention without disrupting the classic feel. CEO Dmitry Bobrov outlines a player-first monetization mix of ads, à la carte purchases, and subscriptions that coexist smoothly. Content partnerships and community feedback power differentiation and direction.
Game Design Insights 🎮
Building Soul Dier: A No-Grind, High-Tension Tactics RPG in Godot
Two Hong Kong devs break down Soul Dier – Part 1, a Godot 3 tactical RPG that ditches grind and filler for dense, fair challenge. Every level adds fresh enemies or mechanics, reinforced by clear telegraphs and a subtle “timer” that rewards efficient play. Custom tools and a robust shader caching system smooth performance, while a logical, character-driven story anchors the journey. Beta’s underway, with an autumn 2025 release and wishlists open.
Subnautica 2 Dev: Survival Is Instinctive, Retention Is Content
Subnautica 2 designer Anthony Gallegos says survival games resonate because they tap primal needs like shelter and food, making their systems widely approachable—even with minimal onboarding. The challenge is retention: players often bounce after consuming all current content and return for updates. Reflecting that reality, Subnautica 2 is delayed to 2026 to polish systems and add more content, with Krafton noting the delay isn’t contract-driven.