Unity Rain System 🌧️, Unity CLI Agents 👨💻
🌧️ Advanced Rendering & FX
New URP Rain System Auto-Handles Roofs, Ripples, and Wind in Unity
Prism Works has released Dynamic Rain System URP, a VFX Graph–powered solution for realistic rain in Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline. It uses depth buffer sampling to keep ripples aligned with terrain and multi-level surfaces, while a raycast-based height map makes rain stop naturally under roofs with no manual setup. The asset includes five intensity presets, Perlin-noise wind, smooth transitions, a camera-follow option, and a demo scene for fast integration.
What Subnautica 2 Taught Us About Huge UE5 Worlds
Unknown Worlds breaks down how they’re building Subnautica 2’s massive, hand-crafted, underwater world in UE5—already at 100,000 actors and growing. The team shares painful lessons from over-engineered tools like a bespoke procedural resource system they ultimately scrapped, and how World Partition, built-in PCG, and Asset User Data proved more sustainable. They also dive into plugin choices, large-scale editor workflows, and heavy animation optimization for dozens of non-humanoid creatures. The core takeaway: work with Unreal’s systems, not against them.
🛠️ Tools, Workflows & Performance
Drive Unity from the Terminal: New CLI, Agents, and Live Edits
Unity’s new CLI and pipeline package turn the Editor into a local command server controllable from a terminal, agents, or custom tools. You can manage Play mode, recompiles, tests, and even run C# via eval inside a live editor or build. The system supports custom commands for complex workflows—like full VR boilerplate setup or automated balance tests—and exposes a deterministic API ideal for AI agents. With runtime support, you can tweak gameplay, swap assets, and drive playtests on running builds without rebuilds.
How Epic Builds 60 FPS UE5 Games on Gen 9 Consoles
Matt Oztalay delivers a crash course in designing UE5 games around a 16.66 ms frame budget from day one. He explains how to configure scalability, dynamic resolution, and device profiles for a “secondary upscaling” rendering strategy, then walks through world-building, AI, animation, VFX, and rendering patterns that scale to big open worlds on Gen 9 hardware. The talk also highlights new 5.8 features like Megalights, improved Fast Geo, World Streaming Insights, and Horde performance dashboards to catch regressions early.