Unreal Mutable 🎮, Unreal 5.6 DLSS 🎬, Multi-core CPU 🧵, GUI debate 👨💻
Unreal Pipeline & Production 🎮🎬
Runtime Customization in Unreal: Mastering Mutable for Characters and Beyond
Mutable powers real-time, scalable customization in Unreal—starting with characters, but extending to vehicles, weapons, and props. This talk explains how Mutable works, best practices for authoring and optimization, and common pitfalls to avoid. It closes with production case studies and lessons learned, giving you a practical playbook for shipping robust customization systems.
Unreal 5.6 Virtual Production: DLSS for nDisplay, Quick Render, and More
Unreal Engine 5.6 lands major virtual production wins: DLSS upscaling for nDisplay (operator-switchable with TSR), stronger reliability and standards (primary node failover, OpenTrackIO, SMPTE 2110 GPUDirect), and a faster Movie Render Queue with Quick Render and native H.264 MP4s with audio. CAT shot tools streamline naming and schemas, while performance capture adds a Mocap Manager and Take Recorder integration. Looking ahead to 5.7: production-ready Movie Render Graph, revamped live compositing, and nDisplay parity.
Game Tech Deep Dives 🔬⚡
Fast 2D Fluids for Games: Pressure Solves, Advection, and Smoke
Sebastian Lague builds a grid-based smoke simulator from first principles, covering divergence-free velocity fields, Gauss–Seidel/SOR pressure solves, and semi-Lagrangian advection. He handles solid boundaries, velocity interpolation, and speeds things up with parallel pressure solving. Visual experiments include speed overlays, smoke density maps, temperature-driven buoyancy, and vortex shedding. Source code releases publicly on November 11.
Multi‑Core by Default: A Simpler Way to Go Wide on CPU
Instead of single-core code that occasionally “goes wide,” this post argues for writing CPU code that’s multi-core by default—much like GPU shaders. With simple primitives (LaneIdx, LaneCount, LaneSync), you keep debuggability while scaling across cores. It covers uniform range splitting, dynamic task grabbing, barriers, and broadcasting data across lanes, plus when to redesign algorithms (e.g., radix sort) for uniform work. The result: fewer job-system gymnastics, more predictable performance, and cleaner code.
Tools, UI & Business Strategy 🛠️📈
Immediate vs Retained GUIs: Hard Truths from Engine and Tools Devs
Three veteran devs dig into Immediate Mode vs Retained Mode GUIs—what they really are, where they shine, and how to ship them in real tools and games. They bust performance myths (text measurement is the true bottleneck), explain why IDs and caching are essential for animations, and share practical patterns from clay, raylib/raygui, and Adobe’s Modeler. If you build editors, in-game UIs, or VR panels, this is a masterclass in modern UI architecture.
Stop Losing Ad Revenue: Audit, Optimize, and Grow Net Dollars
Veteran expert Kelly Kang shares a practical framework to expose hidden tech fees, fix inefficient ad stacks, and grow net revenue—not just rev-share. Learn when to use header bidding vs. a manual waterfall (and how to test hybrids), which metrics matter beyond ARPDAU/CPM, and how to personalize placements by player type. Includes a launch playbook, team structure guidance, and quick wins that can unlock a 10–15% uplift.