Vulkanised 2026 🎮, RenderDoc 1.41 🐛, Discord Safety 🛡️
Mark Your Calendar 📅
DevGAMM Returns to Portugal: Dates, Summit Details, and 15% Off
DevGAMM is back with a two-part 2025 program: a private C-level Madeira Games Summit (Nov 3–4) and the Lisbon B2B Conference (Nov 6–7) at the Myriad by SANA. Expect 60+ showcase titles, MeetToMatch networking, VIP events, and parties, with companies like FunPlus, EA, and Behaviour Interactive attending. 80 Level will be on site for meetings and a joint talk with Room 8 Studio. Use code HEARMEOUT for 15% off Business and Sessions tickets.
Shape the Future of Vulkan: Vulkanised 2026 and Shading Languages Symposium
Vulkanised 2026 lands in San Diego Feb 9–11 as the largest event for Vulkan developers, with keynotes and deep technical talks on extensions, tools, and real-world rendering techniques. Organized by the Khronos Group, it’s community-driven, accessible, and designed to help steer Vulkan’s future. Immediately after, the inaugural Shading Languages Symposium explores evolving shader languages and next-gen rendering paradigms. Explore the program and register to level up your graphics pipeline.
Graphics Tools & Demos 🔧
RenderDoc 1.41: Full-Thread Shader Debugging Arrives
RenderDoc v1.41 adds workgroup-accurate shader debugging across D3D11, D3D12, and Vulkan, simulating full waves/workgroups for realistic subgroup ops, groupshared memory, and barrier behavior. Be aware of a reported AMD driver issue that can affect multi-thread debugging. The update also reduces D3D12 capture/replay memory usage (especially for UE5), improves Vulkan descriptor handling and extensions, and fixes numerous crashes. Python scripting gets richer type hints with no breaking changes.
OpenGL Path Tracing and SPH Fluids in a PC Demo
This postmortem shows how a PC demo hit 60 FPS path tracing on OpenGL—no hardware RT—using radiance caching (spatial hashing), AO-aware ReSTIR GI, and lightweight spatiotemporal denoising. It pairs with an SPH fluid pipeline powered by sparse tiled grids, LDS neighbor prefetch, subtile load balancing, and Marching Cubes meshing. A unified “particle volume” density field enables fast multi-light self- and cast-shadows via ray marching. Practical, tunable techniques with code and heuristics throughout.
Community & Creator Practices 👥
Discord’s Family Centre Upgrade: Activity Dashboard, Safer DMs, Privacy Controls
Discord is rolling out a Family Centre upgrade featuring a weekly activity dashboard highlighting purchases, calls, and top interactions. Teens can optionally notify guardians when filing reports without revealing full details. Guardians also gain controls over who can message their teen, sensitive content filtering, and personalized ads/data usage. For devs integrating Discord via the Social SDK, this signals higher safety and privacy expectations for teen communities.
Indie Climb: Streamable Design, Smart Scope, and Reusable Code
ISTO Inc.’s Stephen Huang traces a three-person studio’s rise from early missteps to “Get to Work.” The playbook: validate the idea, polish the feel, and build long-term leverage with a reusable core and a studio-first brand. They engineered streamable moments and a planned speedrun race—yielding a 4.7M‑view video and a second launch-sized sales spike. The guiding rule: ship smaller, add one big new skill per game, and focus on what players truly feel.