Unreal 5.7 🚀, Nvidia Vertex Exports 📉, Blender DOOM 🕹️
Engine Features & Assets ✨🛠️
Unreal Engine 5.7 Roadmap: Nanite Foliage, MegaLights, and Built‑In AI
Epic’s UE5.7 roadmap teases major upgrades ahead of Unreal Fest Stockholm. Nanite Foliage (Experimental) debuts with Assemblies, Skinning, and Voxels to deliver animated greenery targeting 60 FPS. MegaLights moves to beta with performance boosts and support for Directional, Niagara, Translucency, and Hair Strands. Plus, a revamped Skeletal Editor and an in-editor AI Assistant for Q&A, code, and guided workflows.
Free Realistic Human Shaders for Godot 4.5 by MatMADNESS
MatMADNESS has released open-source shaders for realistic human characters in Godot 4.5 (likely 4.4), covering skin, eyes, and eye wetness. The pack includes example models and a simple visualizer so you can test and tweak quickly. Licensed under MIT and CC BY 4.0, it’s a flexible starting point—though it’s a WIP and not actively maintained. Try the demo on itch.io and grab the sources on GitHub.
Graphics Oddities & Performance 🧪📊
DOOM, But Inside a Blender Icon: Yes, It’s Playable
The “run DOOM on anything” challenge continues: Alex Telford made DOOM playable inside a Blender icon. He uses a 12x icon scale, pre-cached mini-icons, and a modal timer so the main icon renders a few frames behind—enough to play. Inputs are simulated via toggle properties, all built on the open-source Doomviz Python API. Performance is rough, but the code’s available if you want to try this delightfully cursed hack.
Vertex Exports Aren’t Free: Nsight-Backed Findings on Nvidia GPUs
Increasing vertex shader exports can quietly crush performance. Using Nsight on an RTX 3080 mobile, the author shows draw time nearly triples from 1 to 10 float4 exports due to Primitive Engine pressure and TRAM/ISBE stalls. If the pixel shader doesn’t consume the data, Nvidia appears to skip TRAM allocation, keeping cost flat—unlike a tested AMD GCN 5.0. Floats scale better than float4s, allocations grow per-float, and vendor differences mean you should profile on target hardware.
Design & Systems Thinking 🎮đź§
From Fireball to Framework: Data‑Driven Abilities in Unity
Turn a simple fireball-and-poison demo into a scalable ability framework using interfaces and generics. This tutorial introduces IEffect and IDamageable to decouple abilities from actors, adds an Ability Caster with events, and manages persistent effects with clean lifecycles. You’ll compose multiple effects into one ability and finish with VFX/SFX polish—all in a data-driven, reusable setup perfect for RPGs and action games.
Why Football Games Are Hard: Inside Bitmap Books’ Two Halves
A Tale of Two Halves blends coffee-table craftsmanship with a developer-minded autopsy of football games. Author Richard Moss reveals the genre’s toughest problems—player AI tuning, realism vs fun—and spotlights oddball experiments alongside the big rivalries. He argues EA’s market power has dulled innovation, and suggests contenders could reshape the pitch.