UE5 Shader Overhaul ⚙️, Scalable Soulslike AI 🤖, Cascadeur 2025.3 🤸
🎨 Rendering & Shaders Deep Dive
One Shader, Infinite FX: Mastering Noise in Unity Shader Graph
This in-depth Unity Shader Graph tutorial shows how to build one flexible shader that can generate a huge range of VFX and UI looks—dissolves, glowing outlines, glitches, heat haze, kaleidoscopes, and more. By combining gradient noise, Voronoi, step nodes, and simple remapping, the creator turns a basic sprite into fully procedural art. You’ll learn cheap outlining with ddx/ddy, animated scrolling noise, UV distortion, and world‑space textures. It’s designed for devs who feel “bad at art” but want stylish results.
Inside UE5’s Shader Overhaul: From Hour-Long Cooks to Minutes
Unreal Engine’s rendering team hit a breaking point when internal cooks began recompiling nearly every shader on every build. This talk explains the strike team’s multi-front effort: pre-processing and minifying HLSL, caching individual shaders by stripped source, aggressively deduplicating bytecode and symbols, and leaning on Unreal Build Accelerator. The result is dramatically faster cooks, fewer full invalidations, and much lower memory usage. You’ll also learn practical tips to reduce permutations in your own materials and see what’s coming next for UE’s shader pipeline.
🧠 Smarter Games: AI & Performance
Inside Lords of the Fallen’s Scalable Soulslike AI in Unreal Engine
CI Games’ AI team reveals how they built a scalable, reusable AI architecture for Lords of the Fallen in Unreal Engine. The talk covers a clever navmesh pipeline that handles wildly different enemy sizes, plus a custom path offset algorithm that keeps big foes from hugging walls. It then dives into a data-driven combination of Behavior Trees, State Trees, and Gameplay Abilities for decision-making and reactions. Finally, it shows how aggro scoring and role-based group behavior create fair yet relentless co-op combat.
Sampling vs Instrumentation: How Game Devs Really Profile Performance
Two veteran engine programmers — Dennis Gustafsson (Teardown, Telemetry) and Ritesh Varma (Superluminal) — unpack how modern profilers actually work. They contrast sampling and instrumentation, explain why visual timelines are mandatory for multithreaded games, and share war stories from the bad old days of RDTSC and early multicore CPUs. The discussion digs into Superluminal’s streaming design, capturing 100+ GB traces, and why lowering profiling friction matters more than ever. If you ship performance-critical code, this is a masterclass.
🎮 Tools & Workflow Upgrades
From 69 to 109: An Unreal Fest Megadump of UE5 Tips
In this sequel to the legendary failed “100 tips” talk, Epic’s Ari Arnbjörnsson and a surprise lineup of ex-evangelists and devs finally smash the goal with 109 Unreal Engine tips. They cover everything from batch-editing assets, debugging physics, and taming cook logs to smarter Blueprints, Niagara tricks, PCG-based layout, and time-of-day systems. The tone is playful, but the guidance is serious and specific. If you build in UE, there is something here you’re not using yet.
Cascadeur 2025.3: New Inbetweening, Creature Rigs, and Filament Preview
Cascadeur 2025.3 pushes AI-assisted animation further with a fully reworked Inbetweening system and first-time quadruped support. You can now tune interpolation styles from the timeline, blend classic keys with inbetweens, and retarget motion between four-legged rigs. Under the hood, rigging gains twist/untwist bones, physics become more controllable, and performance improves on long shots. A Windows-only preview build also showcases Cascadeur’s upcoming Filament renderer with upgraded lighting and materials.