Game Engines Database

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Welcome to This week in Game Engines! This is a recurrent digest on gamedev tech news and articles from the week before.

I'm one week behind schedule again! Life circumstances and all at the end of this year, hopefully December will be a bit less intense. But that means we're covering 2 weeks of content!

Game Engine News:

Git Activity:

Engine Updates this Week

Unreal Engine: Unreal Engine 5.7 is now available. Biggest update from last two weeks. Unreal Engine 5.7 makes the most momentum with its PCG tools, with new improvements to Nanite (and the experimental Nanite Foliage), MegaLights moving from experimental to Beta, and an extended MetaHuman integration. As per usual, the update most displays impressive graphics for all features, so I recommend taking a look to know have a good visual representation of all the new features.

Unity: Highlights from the Unite 2025 Keynote. The main announcements from the Unity Unite event, with a preview of Unity next big features and a surprising development: Epic announced that Unity developers will be able to launch their games on the Fornite metaverse platform. There is few to no information about that but the announcement, so for now we can only wonder how this integration will take place (most probably some kind of Unity SDK to make games compatible to Fortnite platform).
Stride: Announcing Stride 4.3. Stride is a C# game-engine that is quite up-to-date with .NET and C# environment development. This new major release updates its .NET and C# to the latest releases, and introduces new Engine features such as a new (blazingly fast) C# physics engine called Bepu physics and Vulkan compute shader support. In particular, I never heard about Bepu physics library before (it sits at 2.4k stars in GitHub, quite a bit less popular than Bullet physics at 14k for example), but Stride positions itself as a Game Engine fully living in the C# ecosystem, so this is a fitting choice of physics framework.
Godot: Godot XR update - November 2025. This post is a good showcase for XR (VR/AR) games made in Godot, with the results of Godot XR Community Game Jam. On the engine development side, it also introduces Spatial Entities and Frame Synthesis, both standardized OpenXR API's.

Phaser: Phaser 4.0 forked with full WebGL 2.0 support. One of the more interesting Phaser posts from last 2 weeks, linking out to Circolo devlog where the developers of the web game forked out Phaser 4.0 to add native WebGL 2.0 support.

Fresh Batch of Links

Most Important Game Engines of All Time. A post from GameFromScratch with 10 of the most influential Game Engines of all time. It's obviously a bit biased, but Mike from GameFromScratch has a great background and it is a fun topic to delve into.
Simulating a Planet on the GPU: Part 1. This is part 1 of a cool devlog on the creation of a Sim Earth kind of game. Covers some ground on procedural generation algorithms and goes very fast from "let's do a Voronoi" to "Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics".

Microsoft Open Source Zork 1, 2 and 3. GameFromScratch covers the open-sourcing of Zork 1, 2 and 3, the series of one of the most famous adventure texts that inspire a whole generation of developers.
Half-life time-traveling bug story thread. Really cool thread about a "time-traveling" Half-life 2 bug that. Short, sweet and easy to understand.
Making Software shaders chapter. I covered Making Software e-book before; it's still incomplete, but the Shader chapter is a really nice read even if you already programmed shaders before. The Hackernews thread about this chapter also contains some good discussion and other shader-related references.

CPU pipeline image from Shader chapter at Making Software

Emulator Bugs: Sega CD. A great piece of retro-programming about a very elusive Sega CD and mad debugging skills to fix an Emulator.
How quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack. Another great piece of retro-programming, this time about Quake and its networking stack. It doesn't delve into the protocol - rather, how Quake made its multiplayer work on both DOS and Windows 95, and what happened at OS level.
Rocketwerkz CEO says frameworks, not engines, are the future of game development. A bit of a contested topic but I can see where the argument of this interview comes from - the idea being that LLM's lower the barrier to program custom-made Engines, in a similar way that visual programming (e.g. blueprints in Unreal) lower the barrier to program simple gameplay mechanics.

Missed something?

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This Week in Game Engines #28

Game Engine News:

Git Activity:

Engine Updates this Week

Fresh Batch of Links

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