Neural Shaders 🧠, OpenGL Path Tracing 💡, Robotics UE5 🤖, Eldiron CRPG 👾
Indie & Retro Game Dev 🎮
Eldiron: Free, Open-Source RPG Maker for Retro Western CRPGs
Eldiron is a free, open-source toolkit for building retro Western-style CRPGs—think Ultima or Wasteland—across 2D, isometric, and first-person views. Built in Rust and licensed MIT, it runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Modern perks include procedural generation, multiplayer plans, and an integrated 3D editor with non-destructive geometry tools. 3D features are actively evolving, with gizmos and a GPU renderer in development.
Inside Mewgenics: Edmund McMillen’s 1,200‑Ability Cat Tactics Roguelike
Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel unpack Mewgenics, a turn-based tactics roguelike where breeding cats fuels multiclass builds and absurdly deep combos. With 1,200 abilities, ~900 items, and systemic elemental interactions, the team leans on deterministic combat, heavy testing, and item durability to keep runs fair and fresh. Expect emergent stories from a lively home simulation—comfort, aggression, totems, and personalities all matter.
Robotics & Unreal Workflows 🤖
Closing the Sim-to-Real Gap: Robotics AI in UE5 with Open GRID
Scaled Foundations shows how Open GRID turns Unreal Engine and AirGen into a cloud-native pipeline for robotics AI. With Nanite, procedural rendering, and physics-accurate environments, teams can simulate sensors and robots in real time. The session dives into composing detection, segmentation, and navigation models for adaptive tasks, and shares a continuum of risk reduction techniques to bridge sim-to-real across multiple robot form factors.
Ship Visuals Fast: Twinmotion Tips, Tricks, and Unreal Handoff
Visualization lead Matt Edmonds shares a practical Twinmotion-to-Unreal workflow to deliver high-quality visuals fast. Learn import strategies (keep hierarchy vs. collapse), the Replace Object superpower for instant high-fidelity swaps, and Populate tools for trees, roads, and believable parking lots. Push out VR and cloud links without heavy setup, then hand off to Unreal via Datasmith when you need advanced control.
Graphics Tech Deep Dives 🔬
How This Demo Runs Real-Time Path Tracing and Fluids on OpenGL
A PC demo achieves 60 FPS path tracing on OpenGL—no hardware RT—using radiance caching with spatial hashing, ReSTIR GI (with an AO-based merging trick), and a lean spatiotemporal denoiser. The post also details a high-performance SPH fluid pipeline with LDS-cooperative tiling/subtiling and marching cubes meshing. Finally, a sparse “particle volume” density field enables unified self- and cast-shadows for particles via ray marching from both particles and pixels.
Beyond Moore’s Law: Unlocking GPUs with Neural Shaders
Rendering is hitting hardware limits, but your GPU’s neural cores are idle. This course introduces neural shading—trainable components embedded in standard shaders—to boost fidelity and efficiency without post-process hacks. Learn how to leverage cooperative shaders to run neural acceleration in-frame and where optimization beats exact solutions (compression, materials, geometry, radiance caching, path guiding). Pragmatic, no-prereq guidance to reach “strawberry-level” detail within real-time budgets.