Xsolla Buy 💸, 100x Cloth 🧵, Godot Material Maker 🎨
Creation Tools Power-Ups 🎛️
Material Maker 1.4: Godot 4 Power-Up for Procedural PBR
Material Maker 1.4 arrives on Godot 4, leveraging compute shaders and multi-window layouts to speed up procedural PBR and improve UX. More than a texture tool, it’s a shader generator with ~250 nodes and exports for Godot, Unity, and Unreal. The roadmap pivots toward model texturing with mask/UV-guided, non-destructive workflows. Used in shipped games, the MIT-licensed tool is growing fast—though official, up-to-date tutorials are still needed.
Stop Alt-Tabbing: USM Brings a Multi-Track Audio Editor to Unity
Kitler Dev’s Universal Sound Manager now packs a multi-track audio editor directly inside Unity, so you can arrange and export without leaving the engine. USM also supports one-line playback and a chainable builder pattern for clean, complex audio behavior.
Unreal Workflows in Focus 🌲🛩️
When Dialogue Trees Become Forests: Taming Unreal’s Node Chaos
Atom Team (ATOM RPG, Swordhaven) revealed a single NPC’s dialogue graph that looks more like a forest than a tree, sparking a fresh debate on Blueprint sprawl. Developers shared tangled node graphs and tips, emphasizing early organization and keeping logic lean. The piece recommends UE5 tools like Actor I/O and Flat Nodes to simplify graphs, plus Property History and Level Optimise Tool for maintenance. You can also study Atom Team’s approach via their open modkit.
Inside Gulfstream’s UE Configurator: Data‑Driven Design with Lumen and Nanite
Gulfstream’s Cabin Creator shows how a data-driven Unreal Engine configurator can power real business results. In this session, the team breaks down its modular architecture, responsive UI, and how Lumen and Nanite enable fully dynamic, high-fidelity aircraft interiors. Born during COVID for remote customer interaction, the tool now drives millions in sales and upsells. A live demo highlights practical techniques you can apply to complex product customization.
Business & Strategy đź’Ľ
Beat the 30% Cut: Xsolla Launches Android Buy Button
Xsolla’s new Buy Button for Android enables US developers to route in-game purchases to a web checkout, bypassing Google Play fees under post–Epic v. Google rules effective Oct 22, 2025. Devs can keep up to 95% of revenue and launch a compliant, conversion-first flow in 24 hours. Paired with Xsolla Web Shop, it unlocks D2C tools like dynamic SKU sync, personalized promos, segmentation, A/B testing, and Offerwall to build direct player relationships.
Revolution Software on Surviving 2025: Beyond Publishers, Beyond Hype
Revolution Software’s Charles Cecil details how the studio survived publisher-era pitfalls, why Kickstarter can’t cover lavish 2D remasters, and where AI truly helps—and hurts. Generative AI failed their art, forcing a full redraw, while AI audio tools paid off. Physical editions keep fans engaged, publishers still matter for logistics, and the easy-money years are over.
Tech Breakthroughs ⚙️
Offset Geometric Contact: Real-Time, Penetration-Free Cloth at 100x Speed
A University of Utah team introduces Offset Geometric Contact (OGC), a method that guarantees penetration-free cloth and thin-shell simulation without costly continuous collision detection. By offsetting faces along normals and using vertex-specific bounds, OGC runs as massively parallel local operations ideal for GPUs. Tests on large scenes (50 cloth layers, 500k vertices) show >100x speedups with consistent frame budgets, enabling fast, stable, and artifact-resistant contacts for real-time games.
Work Smarter in UEFN: Scene Graph Prefabs Cut Verse Code
Epic shows how UEFN’s Scene Graph—entities, components, and prefabs—turns Fortnite Creative into a reusable, data‑oriented workflow. Make one prefab, update every instance, and fine‑tune with per‑instance overrides while exposing parameters in the details panel. New collision, overlap, and raycast tools power richer gameplay, plus runtime spawning/removal via the Simulation Entity. A Space‑Invaders‑style case study replaces many Creative devices and ~700 lines of Verse with a few prefabs and cleaner logic.