Godot 4.7 QoL 🎮, Unity China Purge 💰
📰 Engine & Tools News
Godot 4.7 Dev 2 Brings Big Editor QoL and Wider HDR Support
The second development snapshot of Godot 4.7 shifts into high gear with major editor quality-of-life upgrades and expanded HDR support. Developers can now copy and paste entire property sections, benefit from a monospaced font for code identifiers, and tidy complex timelines with collapsible animation track groups. HDR moves beyond Windows to Apple platforms, while large engine changes continue to roll out in smaller increments. With 248 fixes from 105 contributors, the team is actively seeking community testing and GitHub feedback.
Unity Asset Store Shake-Up: China-Based Assets Removed, Refunds Offered
Unity has announced that all China-based assets will be removed from the global Asset Store, and developers in Greater China will completely lose access to the store and their libraries after March 31. While affected assets will keep working for existing owners, they won’t receive updates or support going forward. Unity is extending the refund window to six months for these items and added a one-click “Download All” option so users can back up their collections. The move, seemingly related to a localized Tuanjie Engine store, has sparked strong negative reactions and worries about a fractured global dev ecosystem.
🕹️ Game Dev Deep Dives
Torque, Inertia, and Quaternions: Building 3D Rigid-Body Rotation
Before coding a rigid-body system, this tutorial walks through the physics that make objects feel solid and believable in 3D games. It contrasts simple point-mass motion with true rigid bodies that can spin, tip, and rotate around their center of mass. The creator derives formulas for tangential speed, torque, and moment of inertia, then shows how they become vectors, matrices, and quaternions in 3D. It’s a focused crash course in the rotational core behind modern physics engines.
Inside ARC Raiders: UE5 Tech, PvPvE Design, and 14M Copies Sold
From an early co‑op concept to a wildly successful PvPvE extraction shooter, ARC Raiders is a case study in bold design decisions paying off. Embark Studios used UE5’s World Partition and Runtime Virtual Texturing to stream a massive, post‑apocalyptic Italy seamlessly, while advanced physics, locomotion learning, and procedural animation bring its industrial robot enemies to life. A meticulously crafted soundscape uses spatial audio and acoustic simulation to convey danger and information without UI clutter. On the backend, Epic Online Services powers anti‑cheat and proximity voice chat, including a custom in‑game voice changer for safer, more immersive comms.