This Week in Game Engines #30

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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.

Game Engine News:

• Godot: Dev snapshot: Godot 4.6 dev 6
• Phaser: I built the best virtual joystick for PhaserJS
• Phaser: Pumpkin Blast: Halloween game using JS
• Phaser: Delve Online
• Unity: Unity 6.3 LTS is now available
• Unreal Engine: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: autonomy, creativity, and co...
• Unreal Engine: CORYS reimagines railway simulation with Unreal Engine 5
• Unreal Engine: Over 20 Unreal Engine titles nominated in The Game Awards...
• Unreal Engine: Explore the updates to the Game Animation Sample Project ...
• Unreal Engine: Rotor Studios switches its entire automotive visualizatio...
• Unreal Engine: Behind the scenes of Quentin Tarantino’s The Lost Chapter...
• Unreal Engine: Rotor Studios switches its automotive visualization pipel...
• RPG Bakin: イベント出展！「大阪ゲームダンジョン」
• Anki 3D Engine: Minimalist ray-tracing leveraging only acceleration struc...

Git Activity:

• UPBGE: Weekly UPBGE Build
• Eldiron: v0.8.90
• Wicked Engine: 0.71.864
• GDevelop: 5.6.249
• Solarus: S2009 closed merge request !1617: [Documentation] Review ...
• Stride: releases/4.2.1.2487
• PlayCanvas: v2.14.0
• RPG Paper Maker: 3.0.14
• Drag[en]gine: github-build-number-478
• MEG-4: bzt commented on issue #26 at bzt / meg4
• PixiJS: v8.15.0-rc
• Excalibur.js: 0.32.0-alpha.1584+848778d: chore: Update dependency @type...
• Ebitengine: v2.9.5
• Intersect: 0.8.0-beta.560
• Flecs: Flecs v4.1.3
• Redot Engine: redot-4.4-stable: Merge pull request #1118 from Arctis-Fi...
• Spartan Engine: Spartan v2025.12.04.20.10
• Lisien: clayote pushed to attrs at clayote/Lisien
• Robust Toolbox: v268.1.0
• Carimbo: v5.0.15
• SDL Simple DirectMedia Layer: release-3.2.28

Biggest Engine Updates

• Unity: Unity 6.3 LTS is now available. The biggest release this week, Unity 6.3 LTS (Long Term Support, meaning two years of dedicated support) packs many new features, including:
  
  - Simplified cross-platform support with Platform Toolkit, Nintendo Switch 2 support out-of-the-box, new Android XR capabilities.
  

- Performance and stability updates, with the help of Unity partners to validate new 6.3 workflow improvements on live games.
- Improved editor tooling, specially on shader and VFX authoring.

- New Multiplayer Templates and Unity Building Blocks, a collection of customizable and extensively documented gameplay assets (such as Player Authentication, Leaderboard, Achievements, etc) to be used as a reference and bootstrap on new projects.

Overall a great update with the promise of being stable, trustworthy improvement over previous versions, the biggest developer communication improvement I've seen in a while from Unity corp.

• Unreal Engine: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: autonomy, creativity, and community key to Sandfall Interactive’s success. This is the best opportunity I have to use Expedition 33 as the banner image of a blog post, so of course I will. This is the usual Unreal Engine interview blog post, talking a bit about the main Unreal Engine features used in the game, what made the most difference in development, etc. Main takeaway is the iteration speed Unreal Engine allowed to the team with the biggest features such as Nanite, MetaHuman, Sequencer, etc.
  

• Unreal Engine: Explore the updates to the Game Animation Sample Project in UE 5.7. More free learning content for Unreal Engine, this time an updated version of the Game Animation Sample Project. The new content provides the Mover Plugin (experimental, for network rollback support), new locomotion dataset with 400 new animations, and many other tweaks.
• Unreal Engine: Behind the scenes of Quentin Tarantino’s The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge. A collaboration I never thought would happen between Fortnite and Tarantino, with a surprising lack of 3D feet scan tech. Good read for the cool tech they DID use like MetaHuman facial-rig and MuzzleReport (a hardware they attached to gun props to simulate in real-time gun feedback for actors and in UnrealEngine the bullet hits in the 3D space).
  

• Godot: Dev snapshot: Godot 4.6 dev 6. Godot enters feature freeze, aiming for an easier stable transition for the Beta, so there are no big features on this release. Doesn't mean there are no NEW features though, specially exciting being able to use Tracy profiler with GDScript.
• Anki 3D Engine: Minimalist ray-tracing leveraging only acceleration structures. Anki is quite a small engine compared to the others listed here but it does have some interesting Rendering information on its website (a better explanation of Anki's rendering pipeline here). This latest development is easy to understand even if you're not graphical engineering savvy: it describes how Anki leverages a "potato-mode" ray tracing on devices with low graphic resources like mobile devices.

Fresh Batch of Links

• GDevelop 5.6: Real-Time 3D Editor Now Available. GDevelop has been updating its 3D workflow for a while, and now it officially enters Beta, meaning most of the features are ready to be used and tested and with the impressive touch-screen support for developers using GDevelop on a tablet. This includes new editor tools for 3D navigation and object placement, support for new 3D effects, new 3D assets and templates on GDevelop Asset Store, and many other features.
  

• Around The World, Part 27: Planting trees. This is a blog post from a series I've posted about in a previous newsletter. Great content for world building nerds, with plenty of references for generating procedural terrain, weather, compatible vegetation, etc.
  

• Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game? Nice write-up of a bug that starts with a buzzing headphone and ended up with a GPU pipeline optimization.
• Why WinQuake exists and how it works. Another blog post from Fabien Sanglard on Quake source-code exploration, this time on the different Quake versions that seen the light of day on the Windows 95 era.
• Wolfenstein 3D's map renderer. Since we're feeling a bit Id Software this week, this is a great and short video explaining the math behind Wolfenstein raycasting.
• Validating Blueprints' Content in Unreal. Small Unreal Engine content on Blueprint validations, specially useful on more complex pipelines that use Asset Validators (without the need to code in C++).
• Color Grading, An Artist Driven Approach. Nikos Papadopoulos does a lot of bit-sized post on graphics, this is a nice and very introductory post on Color Grading and use of Color Look-Up Tables.
• A series of tricks and techniques I learned doing tiny GLSL demos. This is a post explaining the shader tech behind 4 small GLSL demos, optimized to run with less then 512 characters. Great post with cool visual demos and easy to follow math.
  

• Chuck Benton and Softporn Adventure. A tantalizing title I probably can't use when sharing this newsletter. This is an interview with Chuck Benton, legendary developer behind, well, Softporn Adventure (the Leisure Suit Larry forerunner). Great time capsule to the golden age of Sierra.
• Mr. Roberts Goes to Hollywood, Part 2: The Producer. This is the follow-up part from the previous Digital Antiquarian post about the Space Sims era with Wing Commander. Amazing read with a surprising investigative twist.

Missed something?

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