GDC Costs 🎮, SpacetimeDB Servers 🌌, Indiana/DOOM Filtering 🖼️
Industry & Backend 🌐
GDC Founder: Sky-High Costs Make the Conference a “Dinosaur”
GDC founder Chris Crawford argues the conference’s “gigantic” costs no longer make sense in an era of cheap, global online collaboration. Despite GDC’s rebrand to “Festival of Gaming,” he says forums and interactive video now fulfill its original purpose. The Guardian also questions the event’s viability, citing prohibitive pricing and reluctance to travel to the US. GDC has been asked for comment.
SpacetimeDB: Real-Time Databases as Game Servers Explained
Jonas Tyroller chats with Tyler F. Cloutier about SpacetimeDB—the real-time relational database powering Bitcraft by making the database the game server. They cover reducers, live queries, hot-swapping, per-match databases, and performance trade-offs like locks vs MVCC. Expect practical takes on auth, UGC, timers-as-tables, time-travel debugging, and matchmaking, plus how it compares to Firebase/Supabase/Vercel. The episode also details self-hosting, cloud options, and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Engine VFX & Assets ✨
MRI-Inspired Godot Shader + CC0 Assets from Shaders Bible Author
Fabrizio Espindola (The Unity Shaders Bible, Jettelly) showcases an MRI-style Godot shader using pixel discards, plane ray marching, and texture array projection—and releases the shader, textures, and a crab mesh for free under CC0. He’s also building The Godot Shaders Bible, a community-shaped guide for all levels that helps support Godot’s development. The bundle is currently 30% off and includes free future updates.
Unlimited Sci‑Fi Forcefield Impacts in Unity with Just Two Draw Calls
Game Developer miks_00 debuts a cinematic sci-fi forcefield effect for Unity that’s both plug-and-play and highly optimized. The shield renders as a separate mesh—no material changes needed—while impacts are instanced via CommandBuffers and DrawMeshInstanced for effectively unlimited hits. The entire effect runs in a maximum of two draw calls. It’s available now on the Unity Asset Store.
Cameras & Rendering 🎥
Mastering Cinemachine 3.1: Fix Jitter, Slow‑Mo Orbits, Group Framing
This final Cinemachine 3.1 episode delivers rapid-fire tips to level up your camera work. Learn to eliminate jitter by matching Brain updates, constrain FreeLook arcs, and rotate in real time during slow motion with Ignore Time Scale. Harness FreeLook Modifiers for dynamic lens/composition shifts, swap cameras by priority for instant view/target changes, and use Impulse to shake objects. Finally, keep multiple fighters framed perfectly with Target Group and Group Framing.
How Indy and DOOM Quietly Auto-Tuned Anisotropic Filtering
Anisotropic filtering can spike cost as scenes change—worse with Sampler Feedback Streaming on Xbox Series. This post shares a simple smoothing + hysteresis algorithm that ties tap count to DRS without visible flip-flops, shipping in Indiana Jones and DOOM: The Dark Ages for silent perf/quality wins. Series S ran 1–8 taps, Series X 4–10 with a bias to 8. MIT-licensed code included and easily adapted to shadows and other settings.