Jolt 5.4 ⚙️, Vulkan RT 🔦, OGC Collisions 🧵, ML Upscaling 📱
Gameplay Systems & Physics ⚙️
Unity Targeting Made Modular: Strategy Pattern for Self, AoE, Projectiles
This tutorial builds a clean, strategy-based targeting system for Unity that handles self-buffs, AoE with a live preview, and projectiles that find enemies on impact. All strategies plug into a single player manager for easy reuse and extension. Effect factories decouple targeting from effect creation, making new abilities straightforward to add. Source code and utilities are included to jumpstart integration.
Jolt Physics 5.4: Cosserat Rods, Hinge Drives, and Big Fixes
Jolt Physics v5.4.0 lands with Cosserat rods for soft bodies, making cheap, convincing vegetation and rod-like simulations easier. You can now drive hinge constraints with ragdoll motors and set target orientation in body space, while soft-body faces can be made double‑sided for flags and cloth. Characters get compound shape support and easier settings access, plus sensor toggles on bodies. A long list of collision, Vulkan, and serialization fixes boost stability—note a few minor breaking changes.
Graphics & Ray Tracing 🔦
Why ML Upscaling Fails on Mobile—and How CRT Shaders Win
Timothy Lottes explains why higher panel resolutions and ML/TAA upscalers can hurt handheld gaming with added latency and power costs—often without real sharpness gains. He showcases CRT-style, subpixel-aware spatial scaling with energy redistribution as a fast, controllable alternative that hides resolution limits and preserves detail. The talk covers practical pitfalls (LCD inversion, W‑OLED gamut loss, QD‑OLED layouts, DSC/chroma subsampling) and shares shader-based modes that emulate vintage clarity on modern displays.
Vulkan Ray Tracing Tutorial v2.0: From Raster to Rays, Step by Step
A complete rewrite of the Vulkan Ray Tracing Tutorial brings full Vulkan 1.4 support, VMA, and Slang. Follow an 8-phase, hands-on path that transforms a raster app into a ray tracer, with compilable checkpoints at every step. Learn industry-standard acceleration structures, shader binding tables, and RT pipelines, plus dive into 15+ specialized tutorials for advanced topics.
Simulation Breakthroughs & Dev Journeys 🚀
OGC: 100x Faster, Penetration‑Free Cloth and Hair Collisions
Researchers unveil Offset Geometric Contact (OGC), a collision model that guarantees penetration-free cloth/hair simulation with >100x speedups over prior methods. OGC offsets mesh features along their normals to form volumetric blocks, producing orthogonal forces and enabling larger contact radii without artifacts. Per-vertex displacement bounds eliminate costly continuous collision detection and speed convergence. Built from massively parallel local operations, OGC is highly GPU-friendly and maintains consistent real-time budgets.
From Scalpel to Shaders: A Doctor’s Journey into Game Dev
A surgeon-turned-programmer shares how he learned C, shipped AV Racer in five months, built a shader-powered image viewer, and why he ditched OpenGL for Direct3D 11’s superior debugging and reliability. He details AnyDesk’s immediate‑mode UI (inspired by Ryan Fleury) and a deep dive into 3D car physics using Jolt. After blasting hospital software performance, he’s pivoting toward full-time dev to ship a street racing game—and eventually build better medtech.