Atmospheric Scattering 🌌, Unreal Deprecation Tool 🛠️
🎮 Game Dev Deep Dives
Inside Foundry: Building a First-Person Factory Sandbox That Respects Your Time
Foundry’s developers unpack how they’re building a first-person voxel factory game around player freedom and systemic depth. The interview covers everything from grid-based FP construction and art-directed procedural worlds to the upcoming train system that redefines long-distance logistics. Underneath, a custom C++ simulation, Unity frontend, and lockstep multiplayer keep massive factories deterministic and performant. Heading toward 1.0, the team is focusing on clearer progression, better pacing, and late-game goals without sacrificing sandbox creativity.
From Blue Sky to Orbit: Implementing Atmospheric Scattering for Games
Inspired by NASA imagery and modern game engines, this article shows how to recreate realistic skies, sunsets, and orbital views entirely in shaders. You’ll learn how to raymarch a volumetric atmosphere, integrate Rayleigh/Mie scattering and ozone, and apply the effect as a post-process that respects scene depth. The piece then scales up to planet-sized rendering, solving issues like thin atmospheric shells, eclipses, and off-world atmospheres. It finishes with a LUT-based optimization pass that swaps expensive light-marching for fast texture lookups.
🛠️ Tools & Engine Workflows
Stop Shipping Old Assets: Deprecation Manager for Unreal + UE 5.8 Preview
For Unreal teams drowning in legacy content, Deprecation Manager offers a clean way to phase out old assets without losing control. The editor/runtime tool adds deprecation flags, visual warnings, filters, and runtime logging for any Blueprint, material, or texture that should no longer be reused. With bulk scan, mark, clear, and quarantine operations, it’s built for big productions and long-running projects. The piece also nods to the fresh Unreal Engine 5.8 preview, featuring experimental Mesh Terrain and improved PCG.
Can Unity AI Actually Build Your Game? A Brutally Honest Review
Unity AI (beta) gets thrown at three real indie workflows: shipping a simple “car wash” game from a full GDD, acting as a level designer with an Asset Store dungeon pack, and cranking out fast prototypes. Asset and code generation regularly ignore specs, hallucinate package IDs, and stall on editor pop‑ups, while the level designer only impresses on very simple prompts. The one standout is rapid, throwaway prototyping—like a working Flappy Bird clone in minutes. With frequent bugs, weak orchestration, and credit burn on failures, the creator calls it a “hard no” at $10/month—for now.