Godot 4.7 dev 🎮, Metal Downsampler ⚙️, Unity 2D Particles ✨
⚙️ Cutting-Edge Engines & Rendering
Godot 4.7 Dev1 Lands With DrawableTextures, Virtual Joysticks, and HDR
Godot has released its 4.7 dev1 snapshot, focused on long-requested quality-of-life and graphics upgrades. Highlights include built-in VirtualJoystick support for mobile controls, a simplified DrawableTexture API for drawing directly onto textures, and smarter 3D path editing with collider snapping. The engine also gains foundational Vulkan raytracing work and early HDR output on Windows as part of a wider rendering roadmap. With 311 contributions in this build, the team encourages backups, thorough testing, and bug reports before final 4.7.
Single Pass Downsampler in Metal: Building a Fast Depth Pyramid
This post shows how to implement a Single Pass Downsampler (SPD) in Apple’s Metal API to build a depth pyramid for occlusion culling. Each 16×16 threadgroup handles a 64×64 tile, writes mip 0 directly, and iteratively reduces 2×2 blocks in threadgroup memory through multiple mips. At mip level 6, a device-wide barrier and a global atomic counter identify the last-finished threadgroup, which then computes the remaining mips alone. The article includes detailed code snippets and synchronization explanation.
🎮 Game Dev Workflows & Techniques
Parallax Particles in Unity 2D with One Orthographic Camera (No Code)
Sasquatch B Studios shows how to get smooth parallax particles in a 2D Unity game using just a single orthographic camera. Instead of juggling multiple cameras and culling masks, it stores a per-system parallax multiplier in particle Custom Data and reads it through a URP Shader Graph. The shader offsets particle world positions based on camera movement entirely on the GPU, giving you layered background and foreground dust effects. The whole setup works with one shared material and requires no custom scripts.
Pascal, Delphi, Xbox, AngularJS: A Veteran Engineer’s Story
Wookash hosts Chuck Jazdzewski for a two‑hour deep dive into decades of software evolution. Starting with why Pascal mattered and how it morphed into Delphi, Chuck walks through his time at Microsoft, including NOPF, Silverlight, and a surprising Xbox-to-Windows detour. He breaks down AngularJS in plain language, then shifts to Android development and Jetpack Compose for modern app builders. The episode ends with strong opinions on tools, languages, and where platforms are headed.