Godot 4.6 Beta 🎮, DOTS Performance Boost ⚙️, Procedural Maps 🗺️, Unity UI Shaders✨
🕹️ Engines, Rendering & New Tools
Godot 4.6 Beta: New Renderer, IK System, and GDScript Profiler
Godot 4.6 beta 1 is out, locking in features for the next major engine update. Highlights include AGX tone mapping and an overhauled Screen Space Reflections pipeline, boosting both image quality and GPU performance. The editor gains a new default Modern Theme, fully dockable bottom panels, and tighter array inspectors. On the workflow side, there’s a native IK stack, GDScript profiling via Tracy, and a slick drag‑and‑drop export variable workflow.
Designing for 32:9: What Super Ultrawide Gaming Gets Right and Wrong
Spanning hardware, productivity, and dozens of games, this piece is a brutally honest look at life on a 49" 32:9 monitor. It shows how the Odyssey Neo G9 pairs an excellent HDR panel with flaky firmware, poor ergonomics, and half-baked “gamer” features. In games, 32:9 alternates between jaw-dropping immersion and frustrating incompatibility, exposing issues in FOV handling, HUD design, and camera projection. For devs, it’s a practical guide to what ultrawide users really go through.
⚙️ Performance, Systems & Big Worlds
Boosting GameObject Performance with DOTS: Lessons from Survival Kids
You don’t have to go all-in on Entities to benefit from DOTS. In this talk, the Survival Kids team demonstrates a hybrid workflow, using Burst, Jobs, Systems, and Collections to speed up a GameObject-based game. They cover multithreaded transform updates via TransformAccessArrays and custom Burst-compatible camera logic derived from Unity’s own source. Detailed profiler insights show exactly how these changes translated into real-world performance improvements.
From Simple Rules to Huge Maps: Procedural Generation with Wave Function Collapse
Using Carcassonne as a visual metaphor, Zac Garby walks through how Wave Function Collapse turns simple adjacency rules into rich, coherent maps. Each empty tile starts as a set of possible pieces, then “collapses” based on constraints, probabilities, and entropy, much like a quantum system. Redefining wave functions and using Shannon entropy allows the generator to favor long roads and large cities, yielding boards that resemble skilled human play. The video ends with massive auto-generated maps and playful entropy-based variations.
🎨 UI, Shaders & Dev Talks
Allen Webster on 4coder, C Scripting, and Life at RAD Game Tools
Allen “Mr. 4th” Webster joins the Wookash Podcast for a two-hour deep dive into building tools for programmers and game developers. He walks through the origin and surprising reception of his custom editor 4coder, the hardest technical and design problems he faced, and how he even “accidentally” invented a preprocessor along the way. The conversation also covers his time at RAD Game Tools, his C scripting work, and how he approaches content creation and personal branding as a developer.
Animating Unity UI with Shader Graph: Greyscale to Party Gradients
Learn how to turn basic Unity UI sprites into stylized, interactive elements using Canvas Shader Graph. The tutorial builds from a custom greyscale shader with per-channel control, to a tint shader using blend modes, to animated and static gradient versions that can drive “party” color cycles or subtle overlays. You’ll hook these effects up to hover events via C# and IPointer interfaces, and generate gradient textures from inspector Gradients for full art control. It’s a gentle, practical intro to Shader Graph for UI-focused game devs.