Niagara Compute ⚙️, UEFN Design 🧱, .NET builds 👨💻
🕹️ Interactive Worlds & Input Magic
Disney-Princess Vibes: Controlling Unreal Birds with Your Hand
A new TouchDesigner experiment brings Disney-princess-style animal interaction closer to reality. Using MediaPipe hand tracking inside TouchDesigner, developer Amirhosein Shabazadeh drives a 3D bird in Unreal Engine, making it fly on and off screen with simple hand motions. The article also showcases Shabazadeh’s broader 3D art portfolio and recommends Kat Zhang’s tests as further examples of what TouchDesigner can do.
Powering Up UEFN: Entity-Component Design with Scene Graph & Verse
Evan Brown’s Unreal Fest 2025 talk dives into Scene Graph, UEFN’s new unified structure that replaces heavy Verse devices with lightweight entities and components. By attaching custom Verse components and built-in features like keyframe movement, creators can turn simple meshes into moving, rotating, scalable obstacles, then save them as prefabs for instant reuse. The session compares the old 400-line device approach to a drag-and-drop Scene Graph workflow that runs code directly on entities, and closes with future plans like physics integration and characters as entities.
💥 Simulation, Strategy & Smart Systems
Niagara as a Compute Engine: RTS Units, Avoidance, and Fog of War
Epic’s Matt Oztalay shows how to wring a surprising amount of gameplay out of Niagara by treating it like a compute engine. In this Unreal Fest session, he drives ~4,000 RTS units on a Galaxy S10 using one Niagara system, render targets, and Neighbor Grid 3D for cheap avoidance. He also demonstrates bit-packing multiple unit states into a single float and building fog of war from custom distance fields. It’s a dense, practical guide for tech artists pushing large-scale simulations in Unreal.
Unreal Engine 5.7: Substrate, Nanite Forests, and Smarter Animation
Unreal Engine 5.7 is a big step forward for open worlds and high-end visuals. Substrate is now production-ready and enabled by default, bringing robust layered materials and effects like iridescent metals. Nanite foliage introduces modular, skeletal-assembly trees with a voxel fallback, letting you render seamless massive forests without hand-authored LODs. PCG and the new procedural vegetation tools are now production ready, and animation workflows get smarter locomotion, better retargeting, and friendlier Control Rig tools.
🎨 Game Design Craft & Player Experience
Balancing Repetition and Variety: A Practical Guide for Indie Game Design
What makes one game hypnotic and another a slog? This talk argues it’s how you balance repetition and variation. Repetition creates learnable, satisfying core actions; variation delivers surprise, challenge spikes, and long-term engagement. The video walks through nested game loops, common indie mistakes, and a concrete production model that separates core mechanic prototyping from content and variety prototyping, helping you build a coherent, genre-appropriate game instead of a boring grind or chaotic mess.
Niagara as a Compute Engine: RTS Units, Avoidance, and Fog of War
Epic’s Matt Oztalay shows how to wring a surprising amount of gameplay out of Niagara by treating it like a compute engine. In this Unreal Fest session, he drives ~4,000 RTS units on a Galaxy S10 using one Niagara system, render targets, and Neighbor Grid 3D for cheap avoidance. He also demonstrates bit-packing multiple unit states into a single float and building fog of war from custom distance fields. It’s a dense, practical guide for tech artists pushing large-scale simulations in Unreal.
⚙️ Dev Workflow & Engine Deep Dives
Why Your .NET 8 Project Rebuilds Everything for Tiny Changes
The author digs into a mysterious 12-second “no-op” C# rebuild and shows how to profile .NET builds using MSBuild binary logs and the MSBuild Log Viewer. By inspecting “Top 10 most expensive tasks” and searching for “Building target completely,” they trace the issue to Project.AssemblyInfo.cs being regenerated on every commit switch. A .NET 8 feature that embeds the Git commit hash into assembly metadata was forcing full recompiles. Disabling that behavior restores fast incremental builds.
Unreal Engine 5.7: Substrate, Nanite Forests, and Smarter Animation
Unreal Engine 5.7 is a big step forward for open worlds and high-end visuals. Substrate is now production-ready and enabled by default, bringing robust layered materials and effects like iridescent metals. Nanite foliage introduces modular, skeletal-assembly trees with a voxel fallback, letting you render seamless massive forests without hand-authored LODs. PCG and the new procedural vegetation tools are now production ready, and animation workflows get smarter locomotion, better retargeting, and friendlier Control Rig tools.