Roblox payouts 💸, Unity AI copilot 🤖, Unreal Iris replication 🌐, Azur analytics 📊

Unreal Upgrades & Networking 🚀

Build Your Perfect Steed: Unreal Engine Horse Configurator Preview

Character artist Abraham Tovmasyan showcases a near-complete Horse Configurator in Unreal Engine. The 2-minute preview reveals deep customization—body types, hair, accessories—and granular audio controls for footsteps and equipment. It’s a solid foundation for runtime creature editors or companion systems in UE projects. For production tips, check Tovmasyan’s interview on modeling and animating horses.

Inside Iris: Unreal’s Next-Gen Replication, From Design to Fortnite

Epic’s Pet Rangstrom breaks down Iris, Unreal’s data‑oriented, opt‑in replication system that now powers Fortnite. Learn the core pipeline—filtering, quantization, prioritization, serialization—why prioritization replaces net update frequency, and how NetSerializers deliver atomic, bandwidth‑efficient structs. The session shares migration tactics, real ordering pitfalls (RPCs vs properties, async loads), and hands‑on debugging/perf tips with Network Insights and packet simulation. It wraps with Iris’s roadmap toward beta, seamless travel, and replay support.

Unity Performance & AI Copilots 🤖

Master Unity CullingGroup: Smooth Fades, Smart Visibility, Better Performance

Go beyond frustum culling with Unity’s CullingGroup API to drive smart, scriptable visibility and smooth fade effects. This tutorial covers bounding spheres, distance bands, safe register/deregister with erase-swap-back, and syncing native and managed state. Add MaterialPropertyBlock-based fades, timer-driven transitions, and filters by camera, distance, layers, and tags. Finish with flexible modes, priority objects, and UnityEvents for performance and polish at scale.

Code Maestro Launches Public Beta: An AI Copilot for Unity Devs

Code Maestro, an AI copilot for Unity, has entered public beta to help teams ship games faster. Its project-aware agents and proprietary context engine automate refactoring, bug fixes, manifest updates, and SDK integrations via natural-language prompts. Founded by veterans from iLogos and Nika, the startup is part of NVIDIA Inception and backed by angels from Unity, Google, and SEGA. The team frames it as a true collaborator that lets developers focus on gameplay, not grunt work.

Analytics and Creator Earnings 📊

Azur Games Opens Production-Proven Analytics to External Studios

Azur Games has opened its internal analytics platform to external developers, with free access for early adopters. Built from real production needs across 10B+ installs, it unifies creative performance, monetisation, and player behaviour in one system. By connecting UA metrics to in-game behaviour, teams can optimize traffic in real time and avoid costly mistakes. Pre-built dashboards and integrations aim to speed up iteration and growth.

Roblox RDC: 4D Creation, Moments Video, and Bigger Creator Payouts

Roblox is pushing hard on its creator economy, targeting 10% of global gaming content. Creators earned $1B in the last year, and Roblox raised its DevEx rate by 8.5%. New tools include 4D interactive object creation, real-time voice translation, TTS/STT APIs, and an improved AI Assistant. To grow audiences, Roblox is testing short-form video with “Roblox Moments” and expanding partnerships with Mattel.

Modeling Tips & Smarter Bots 🧠

Cleaner Normal Maps: The Case for Support Edges

3D artist Abraham Tovmasyan suggests a faster path to cleaner normal bakes: add support edges instead of painstakingly defining hard and soft edges. With today’s hardware easily handling more polygons, this approach can save time and reduce artifacts. He shares more workflow tips—plus insights on creating and animating a horse—in a new interview. Check out the full piece and his LinkedIn for deeper examples.

Monte Carlo Tactics: Building Human-Level Bots for a Physics Sports Game

This case study shows how MCTS powered human-like AI in Soccer Kids, a continuous, physics-driven, turn-based sports game. The team built a forward model, generated actions with vector math (intercepts, tangent blocks, shot spread), and used polygon clipping for airtight defense. They constrained complexity with one-round rollouts, heuristic opponents, and design-driven scoring—achieving ~12–13k simulations per turn with sub-second response. Expect practical tactics for debugging, performance, and scoping domain-specific work.