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...

Are you or someone you know skipping GDC (or considering doing so) because of worries about coming to the US/San Francisco in the current environment? If so, I want to hear from you for a piece. DM me here or kyle DOT orland AT arstechnica DOT com. Please spread the word

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

Just noticed that 5.7 is the first UE5 version since 5.0 without any explicit Lumen improvements on the roadmap 🧐 Guess MegaLights is the focus for the next few releases?

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

Attention fellow AUSTRALIANS! 🇦🇺 We now have an official petition to parliament to STOP MASTERCARD and VISA from its campaign of censorship, restricting what legal products we can buy. Please sign it now, and if you're not an Aussie, spread the word! www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...

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...

@godotfest.bsky.social is still seeking some volunteers to assist video recordings. Free ticket. Discord: discord.com/invite/vA4pN... Form: forms.gle/73X7M5pa59Dc... #godot #godotfest #godotcon

In a recent talk I called Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 one of the best optimized video games in existence, and there probably aren't many big savings left anymore... Well, just weeks later it's open source re-implementation made the creation of savegames 12(!) times faster 🏎️ openrct2.io/blog/2025/08...

Hi authors! Please remember to file a claim!

Do you have a gamedev blog with RSS active? comment with the link, I'll follow, let's spread a bit of love for good old blogging! mine's in bio if you want.

We've made Property History free & open source! You can use it to quickly see the history of any property in Unreal github.com/VoxelPlugin/...

On my way to Gamescom now! And my train is only 15 minutes late (so far🤞)

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

Optimization tip for owners of small fur factories aka cats: Consider cleaning your PC or laptop from time to time and getting all of the hair out of the fans. Did it this morning, and now I have to re-profile a bunch of stuff because my average frametime was cut in half 🥲

I did a blind test today to convince someone that buying a 144 Hz monitor would be a waste of money, since they only play slow-paced games like JRPGs and wouldn't be able to tell the difference from 60 Hz. Welp, I was proven wrong.

It would be a boring weekend without a new blog post about game optimization: haukethiessen.com/introducing-... This time, it's about the genesis of a tool that I wrote a while ago to identify overly large textures. #gamedev

My new blog post is there, and it's a bit different from usual: Fixing stutters in your own code is hard enough, but this time I try to fix performance issues in a closed-source game. No source code or debug symbols, but a lot of guesswork. larstofus.com/2025/07/27/p... #gamedev #Trackmania

Hot take: If your application's UI contains a list of elements with potentially more than 1000 entries it also HAS TO contain a search bar for this list. No discussions, no exceptions! (Looking at you, Process Explorer) 😭

The idea of filling websites and blogs with AI slop is nothing new. However, this site takes it to a whole new level by writing articles about how to write performant code for Unreal Engine 6 (not a typo) and even inventing new features such as "Nanite 2.0". markaicode.com/cpp-unreal-e... 🫤

The new blender release halved the start time, probably because somebody on the team deemed 7 seconds too slow. (I am reading the release notes and writing this text while I wait for the Unreal Editor to start 🐌)

For the next two days you can find me at the #GermanDevDays in Frankfurt! Talk to me if you are interested in gamedev education, optimization or just want to see some pictures of my cat 🐈

I see this and I'm reminded of that study that shows people literally becoming dumber when overrelying on genAI and I wonder that's what is happening here Like, I'm seriously concerned when people in executive positions are lobotomizing themselves and what that means for the economy and progress

A good example why I am not a fan of instrumentation based profiling - you can only see what the instrumentation wants you to see 😶

UE5 uses a lot of memory. TIL that >50% of it could be untracked! Would have never expected that so much memory used by core systems like Nanite or Lumen could be untracked and thus not possible to investigate with Unreal Insights dev.epicgames.com/community/le... #unrealengine #UE5 #unreal #gamedev

I have rarely been that impressed by a chart design, marvelous work!

The 2025 Godot Community Poll is live! Help us understand our community better and shape the engine's future. Takes just 5-10 minutes: 👉 godotengine.org/article/godo...

After being frustrated with Artstation's blogging options for way too long, I finally moved to WordPress🎉: haukethiessen.com All posts so far did survive the move. I'm still getting used to the newfound freedom and polishing the new site, so please let me know about any rough spots. #gamedev

In preparation for my talk at Unreal Fest Bali this week, I've made a small blog post on how to create a custom FMaterialShader in Unreal: victorcareil.com/making-mater...

Out of curiosity: Does anyone know if @audiokinetic.bsky.social accepts pull requests for #Wwise? Specifically the Unreal Engine plugin? I couldn't find a GitHub repo anywhere 😶

Since the release of 5.6 Unreal's roadmap isn't roadmapping anymore, it just shows already released features😑

This is a pleasant surprise, Epic actually worked on reducing the Unreal's disk size. The core components are around 9 GB smaller and the templates were even shrunk down from 3.7 to 0.8 GB 🥳 ....oh and the new MetaHuman stuff added another 5 GB + 12 GB more debug symbols 🙃 Well, it's something

I checked out the new Unreal 5.6 templates and all I can say is what the actual fuck.

I'm tinkering with Blender again for the first time in years. Wasn't the UX supposed to be much improved now? I can't work for more than a few seconds without hitting another roadblock: Hidden buttons, unusable defaults, and key bindings that are inaccessible without a numpad. It's baffling o.O

excuse me!!? 😠 Epic marked all my open pull requests for the Unreal engine as "invalid" and closed them. With basically no reason given except a missing "generative AI text". What "AI text", Epic? There is no mention of this in the documentation, but a lot of confused coders in the forum🙄

Are blogrolls still a thing? You know, those lists of recommended blogs that bloggers used to put on their blog's sidebar? Or was this concept killed by social media? I rarely see them nowadays 🥲

In general I'm a fan of TAA, assuming it's implemented correctly without too many artifacts. But it's still good practice to implement an option to disable it. Just so your game doesn't end up on *the list* 👻 docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Oh nooo the official dotnet repo is overrun by spam bots :o .. ooh, wait those are "official" spam bots, guess it's all fine then 🫠

I blogged about how disabling occlusion queries in Unreal 5.5 completely breaks anything that depends on UPrimitiveComponent's GetLastRenderTime(), including Skeletal Animation. https://www.stevestreeting.com/2025/05/22/ue-5.5-skeletal-animation-/-lastrendertime-bug/ #unrealengine

I use my Steam Deck regularly on long train rides, so I'm very aware of how games can impact its battery life🪫. I looked into ways to improve the energy efficiency of games and wrote a list of helpful techniques (not just for the Steam Deck): www.artstation.com/blogs/hauket... #gamedev

The German Dev Days have just announced their program for this year. Guess who will be giving his second talk there? Of course it's about one of my favorite topics: Optimization and framerates. See you there 👋 #GGD2025 #GermanDevDays

Back in March I wrote a short article about framespikes in Unreal: larstofus.com/2025/03/09/w... At that time I wasn't able to find a good fix for it. The good news is that I found a second, similar cause of framespikes, but this time I was able to fix it, so I added small Update to my article 🥳

Fun fact: even in a freshly generated project without any trees, Unreal will *checks notes* ...update the speedtree wind values every single frame? It doesn't take a lot of time (0.05 ms in my testing), but that's still 0.05ms more than it should 🤨

I knew that fans started reimplementing an open source version of Gothci 2 years ago. Just stumbled over it again, apparently it's not only fully playable already, but they even started implementing modern rendering features like virtual shadow maps 🥹 github.com/Try/OpenGoth...

Did you know that there are parts of the Unreal editor that don't support copy and paste? So got around to fix this (and other stuff): larstofus.com/2025/05/03/u... #gamedev #ue5

And again I'm working on Unreal's static mesh editor... It's crazy how many basic features are just missing.

Maybe it's just because I'm mainly a Perforce user, but every time I have to use GitHub I want to smash my head into the keyboard. Why do I only get a "Update Branch" button after selecting the option to sync a fork? 😭Why can't I simply create a second fork? Who designed this interface? 🫠

What are your favorite Godot plugins/addons? It's for a thing 👀 #godotengine

Fun fact: Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, the biggest launch of a CryEngine game in a long time, isn't listed as a CryEngine game on Mobygames. This is because Mobygames only allows the engine to be added to a game if the major version label is known, which... it apparently isn't?