This Week in Game Engines #37

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

This week we have Unity partnering with Netflix, many light engines and Global Illumination acronyms, elevators might not seem fun but they actually are, and more!

Unity is partnering with Netflix

As announced on Unity's Youtube channel and gameindustry.biz, Unity will be giving support for exporting games ready to launch on Netflix platform:

"Unity is bringing dedicated Engine support to Netflix Games, making it easier for developers to build and deliver games across Netflix's multi-platform ecosystem on mobile and TV."

If you are completely out of the loop, Netflix has been supporting cloud-gaming in its platform; meaning, users can play games directly on their TV's by pairing their phones with the TV app and using the phone as a custom-controller (the type of controller changes with the game). Some of the games that the platform supports includes Tetris Time Warp and the party-favorite Jackbox Party Essentials (a smaller, Netflix-focused version).

But are there players in the cloud?

Netflix investment in games is not something new and in the last couple of years I've seen different degrees of success, but the cloud approach is apparently bearing many fruits, even outpacing mobile games revenue. This last article is a summary of last Netflix earning calls, but of the main points is the friction for players to start games on the Netflix platform:

• For Netflix mobile games, players had to download a different game app on App Store / Google Play and link their Netflix account after starting the app.
• For Netflix TV cloud games, the only required step is syncing their phone using QR Code.

If you add to the list the many discoverability problems for mobile games and how finnicky it is to make a player go from "seeing your game banner" to "playing your game", it's no wonder how Cloud games is finally finding it's place in Netflix walled garden.

The new Unity License

If you're planning to make your next game on Unity, it's worth taking into consideration its Terms of Service - specially if you're planning to use any AI tool.

Unity officially killed the Runtime Fee in late 2024 and reverted to traditional per-seat subscription models, which make license budgeting predictable again. But on June 30th, Unity Terms of Service were updated to include the following:

"AI agents, large language models, and MCP clients or servers may only interact with the platform through a framework operated or designated by Unity."

The wording here made it a bit confusing, since according to Unity community managers, this would only apply for tools that are not being triaged via Unity Store. If you want to understand what is the current state of the Unity License terms, I wrote specifically about that in this post.

The many *GI Light Engines

Flax Engine posted this week its Flax Facts newsletter, with some interesting bits of Flax Engine features.

Among them, there is a brief comment on how Flax handle real-time specular lighting with its Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination (DDGI) engine. There is not much description of what DDGI actually means, so I had to look into the Flax Engine documentation and specially in this DDGI deep-dive. In short, it's a "Fire and Forget" kind of light engine: it works both on indoor and outdoor scenes using a grid of light probes that surround the player camera and scroll as the player moves. It has a good performance with some ways to solve light leaking problems, as long as you can pay its runtime cost. But quoting Flax Facts post:

"Ever felt like game performance drops in Flax? Very unlikely given how optimized the engine is, [...]"

You have to love the confidence here.

Flax DDGI Solution Screenshot

Godot (many) light engines

Another Game Engine with well documented light engines is Godot, which has two main distinct high-fidelity real-time light solutions:

• Signed distance field global illumination (SDFGI). It's Godot realtime solution for 3D lighting, works great for any world scale and procedurally generated levels, but has some limitations on dynamic objects (objects can dynamically receive light, not contribute to it).
• Voxel global illumination (VoxelGI). Allow fully dynamic lights and custom light shaders. Light information needs to be baked, but baking can happen in runtime.

Godot SDFGI screenshot example

There is some development history behind both light engines for Godot 4.X version that you can check here, but the post provides a general guide on the usefulness of each method (emphasis mine):

"[...] GIProbe has been replaced by the VoxelGI node, which is a real-time solution fit for small and medium-scale environments. [...] Godot also comes with a GI technique that can be used with large open worlds — signed distance field global illumination (SDFGI)."

Overall, among many *GI acronyms, it was a good opportunity to review some of the different light engine tradeoffs (and I'm not even getting into the beast that is Unreal Engine Lumen). If you're also interested in a deeper dive in the differences between lighting in Game Engines, drop a comment below and I might do a specific post about it.

From the Web

• How Grabbit 2 Simulates Physics Inside the Unity Editor. An interview with the creator of the Unity Grabbit plugin, a level-design tool that allows developers to place objects in-editor using physics.
• Elevators. This is one of the surprising deep-dives I wasn't expecting on elevator algorithms, and in a super nice and interactive way. And if you think this is has nothing to do with games, think again.
• Setting timers in simple games (feat. the frame rule). Short and sweet article on how to track game timers on Lua, using Super Mario Bros disassembled code as inspiration.

Human in the Loop

Henrique here.

Finally added email subscriptions! So if you want to subscribe to the newsletter and receive all posts via email, you're finally able to. It's just a toggle on your profile page, so it's quite easy to unsubscribe if you want. I promise I won't get sad if you change your mind.

Developing this website is hard because I'm insisting on not using other platforms. I used to also post on Substack, but I have decided to implement everything I need here (email subscriptions, comments, etc) to not depend on Substack anymore. I'm quite happy with the results though.

Now, if you ask me if is it worth it?, to be honest I don't quite know yet. Personal development wise yes, for sure, but considering I'm trying to make a living off this website, my insistence on making my own little self-sufficient corner of the internet is still an open question with its own set of big challenges to answer. But for the good and for the bad I'm quite stubborn, so I'll keep insisting on this idea.

Here, have a picture of my cat.

See you next week!

Missed something?

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