My Energy Saving Plugin for Unreal is now also on Fab: www.fab.com/listings/05b... Submission took slightly longer than I'd hoped for, because apparently I really suck at filling out forms😅. #Unreal #Gamedev

I rarely felt so seen while reading a game description:

I'm finally writing up how Nanite Tessellation works. The first few blogs posts are up. More will be coming. graphicrants.blogspot.com/2026/02/nani...

Getting nostalgic, I really like the way Gothic 2 culls interiors when you're outside: Beyond a certain distance, interiors fade to black and are then culled completely. #gamedev

New blog post! Game Development, no matter the engine was always a very windows-focused industry. But in recent years, things started to change, with more and more tools offering native Linux support, even Unreal. So I finally decided to give it a try: #ue5 #gamedev larstofus.com/2026/01/31/i...

I already released the energy saving plugin for Unreal a few weeks ago, and really wanted to give some info on how it works and the motivation behind it, so here's a new blog post: haukethiessen.com/introducing-... #gamedev #Unreal

First time releasing a code plugin on Fab! Not happy with the experience so far, though. I literally have to copy the folder 4 times, adjust the engine version in the uplugin file, and upload all 4 versions separately. If the plugin wouldn't need at least 5.3, I'd need to create 7 versions. #Unreal

The repository is now mirrored on Codeberg, so if you prefer using open source platforms, please give it a try; codeberg.org/HaukeThiesse... #gamedev

Started writing an Unreal plugin that helps to save some energy: github.com/HaukeThiesse... Inspired by Epic's whitepaper about energy saving in Fortnite, but with improvements and additional features as well. Still early days, but I'm very happy with the progress so far. #Unreal #gamedev

Watch this. Watch again. "This incredible thing last night... We have to do it again [in other countries]. We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us."

The Mip Explorer is now also on Codeberg, an open-source alternative to GitHub: codeberg.org/HaukeThiesse... Migrating the repository, including the complete commit history and metadata, was a matter of minutes, can highly recommend👍 #gamedev

Lego The Incredibles is a nice example of how to use old-school blob shadows to communicate information to the player. Flying characters have a blob shadow directly below them, helping the player to understand where exactly the character is is, regardless of the lighting setup. #gamedev

Procrastimization [proh-kras-tuh-muh-zey-shuhn] When you have to fix some big, complicated issuesin your code, but you don't have the energy for that, so you play around with Visual Studio's memory layout view, hoping that saving 2 bytes by re-ordering some variables will fix all your problems.

Just submitted the latest update to the Mip Explorer🥳. It can now calculate the information density per axis. Very helpful to reduce the size of anisotropic textures without losing critical details! github.com/HaukeThiesse... #gamedev

Valve has now rejected my complaint, confirming that "I don't like muslims" is a valid reason to leave a negative review on a game on Steam This is where we're at now.

Pixels don't have to be square. For anisotropic textures, it can make sense to use different resolutions for the x-axis and the y-axis. With the next update, the Mip explorer will display the information density per axis, allowing to scale down textures along the axis with less information. #gamedev

It's great for players as well, but I can't stop thinking about how much easier this change makes things for developers. I don't know Arrowhead's internal pipeline, but copying 154GB from the server every time you want to test the build has to be excruciating😬. www.pcgamer.com/games/action...

Kinda funny to see Tim Sweeney claiming that AI is going to be part of 'nearly all' future games, while at the same time, AI-generated code is bad enough for Epic Games to have a strict No-AI stance when it comes to Unreal pull requests. www.gamesindustry.biz/epics-sweene...

Good news! Epic submitted a fix for this issue! The even better news is that they didn't just merge my proposed fix but wrote a better one, which can even handle arbitrary tooltip types, not just text-only ones. Much better outcome than I could have hoped for 🥳

Very excited to be at the Graphics Programming Conference in Breda next week! www.graphicsprogrammingconference.nl Anyone else there? If yes, I'd happy to meet up!

Waiting for the inevitable Microsoft ad campaign announcing that the upcoming Steam Machines are, in fact, also Xboxes.

The Mip Explorer now also works on Linux🐧🥳 There was never a good reason for it to be Windows-exclusive to begin with, and today I finally had some time to fix this. Tested on Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS, but it should work with basically every distribution out there. github.com/HaukeThiesse... #gamedev

With many games nowadays reaching sizes of 100GB or more, this is really a critical update. Not sure why it took so long, but I'm just happy that it's finally there! store.steampowered.com/news/app/167...

Most people don't know this, but before he founded a city in the Forgotten Realms, Baldur had a successful restaurant in Germany.

Do you want to improve the performance of your il2cpp Unity projects, without changing your code or your assets? My il2cpp build processor cpp2better is now officially available (on request). Reach out to me, details here: blog.s-schoener.com/2025-11-04-c...

New blog post: haukethiessen.com/why-you-shou... It's about best practices when adjusting material parameters for individual mesh components in Unreal. The information itself isn't new, but most tutorials covering this present the most inefficient way to do this. #gamedev #Unreal

Finally updated my blog's robots.txt, it's now blocking 119(!) AI crawlers. For anyone interested, I'm using wordpress.org/plugins/bloc... with automatic updates enabled. Additionally, I used github.com/ai-robots-tx... to add missing entries.

Not commenting is commenting. aftermath.site/microsoft-halo...

Got reminded how important it is to visualize the data you're working with🙈. The normal map normalization in the Mip Explorer was incorrect, causing deviations of ~10 percent. Only when I added the option to display the generated mips, I noticed the colors were off and had a reason to investigate...

If you regularly use the PC Gaming Wiki, for example as reliable source to get older games working on modern systems... consider backing up the pages you are interested in ⚠️ According to staff members on their discord, none of the active staff members have full access to the backend anymore. (1/?)

Even though it was released 25 years ago, I still wonder about about the lore of the Legoland game. It's about building Lego theme parks, but set in the world of Lego. So I'm watching Lego minifigures visit a park about Lego.

The first step to any impressive optimization work is to really mess up the original implementation. Originally, my Mip Explorer created the thumbnails for the file browser at the resolution of the original images, creating copies of all textures in all directories visited in the current session😬.

This is cool. How to make wood stronger than steel, but use 90% less emissions. This should be front page news. This is nobel prize worthy skillz. edition.cnn.com/science/supe...

Stuff like this should be the top story, not today, but for weeks, until we actually start giving a fuck. Runaway climate change will make everything happening in the current wars look like a rounding error. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

One of the biggest flaws of the Mip Explorer was the missing support for tga files, caused by Open CV not supporting that format. Turns out, it does support it, as long as you read it as a video and extract the first frame of it as an image. Sounds weird, but, hey, as long as it works... #gamedev

New update for the Mip Explorer: github.com/HaukeThiesse... There's now a dedicated mode for (tangent space) normal maps which compares normalized vector directions instead of averaged channel diffs. The results aren't that different, but it's just the proper way to deal with them. #gamedev

It's understandable that Unreal needs to touch a lot of files when starting the editor. But what if I told you that >5500 of those files are not needed for the editor to start at all and are just adding seconds to the editor launch time? (Fix included!) #u5 #gamedev larstofus.com/2025/09/27/s...

Becoming obsessed with adding QoL features to the Mip Explorer: - Navigate directories with the arrow keys - Taskbar notification when directory scan ends while app is in the background - Resizable UI - Support for single-channel textures (ok, not just QoL) github.com/HaukeThiesse... #gamedev

Goddamn, Metal Gear Solid 2 with texture filtering turned off is a hell of a vibe

With the latest update for the Mip Explorer, it now also reads and compares the alpha channels if existent, and can process entire directories, returning the results in a sorted list. The goal is to turn this from a toy into a tool for actual production. github.com/HaukeThiesse... #gamedev

Exactly my type of humor. The developers at Epic know better than to allow AI-generated slop in their code base, but Unreal 5.7 will ship with AI code generation tools.

There are a lot of reasons why starting the Unreal editor can be slow. In my latest blog post I fixed 38,000 of them. #ue5 #gamedv larstofus.com/2025/09/02/s...

I wrote an article about how to disable camera motion blur in Unreal, which is a good idea for city builders/RTS games, etc. You only need to change a single line of code, so I won't hold it against you if you only read the TLDR (also just one line). haukethiessen.com/how-to-fix-m... #gamedev

what framerate is perceptually halfway between 30 and 120 fps? A: 75 fps B: 60 fps C: 48 fps

Starting the weekend with an update for the Mip Explorer: github.com/HaukeThiesse... - Several bug fixes (3-4, depending on how you count) - In the Channels mode, the list now actually shows the per-channel differences - Tooltips for the settings #gamedev

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 405 - August 24th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

🚨 BREAKING: 44 MONTH SENTENCE FOR £150 RETOUCH OF 'SUNFLOWERS' PAINTING During their trial, it was acknowledged that only £150 was spent retouching the frame. But Phoebe and Anna were banned from talking about monetary value, so the jury were not informed. novaramedia.com/2025/08/22/t...

We're getting closer and closer to 2027, and I get the feeling that Human Revolution's ceiling predictions were overly optimistic...

Even Wikipedia isn't safe from being flooded with AI slop! I hate this timeline😠