Engine News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

You don't have to wait any longer: the most essential mod to any Bethesda RPG is here and, as per usual, it will fill your game with Thomas the Tank Engine.

One Starfield modder has replaced every single spaceship in the game with childhood mascot Thomas the Tank Engine, and the results are absolute nightmare fuel.

Grand Theft Auto fans are waiting for Rockstar Games to unveil their next installment. It’s a game that’s currently in the works but has been kept under wraps from the public. We wouldn’t know much about the game if it weren’t for the slew of leaks that emerged online. However, a new report has come out that suggests we might see a significant update to Rockstar Games’ RAGE engine. That will make this new upcoming installment from Rockstar Games a really thrilling and immersive experience.

Google's Sundar Pichai raised concerns years before he became the company's chief executive officer that its deal with Apple Inc. had bad “optics” because there was no choice of which search engine to use in the company's web browser.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has just hit digital, with a 4K Blu-ray release planned for later in October. The home video push comes with various behind-the-scenes how-did-they-pull-that-off features — always a must for a movie with this many huge action sequences and complicated stunts.

Unity has announced that John Riccitiello is stepping down as president, CEO, chairman and board member effective immediately.

Epic Games will start charging for the use of Unreal Engine outside of video game development.

Epic Games founder, CEO, and primary stakeholder Tim Sweeney took the stage at this year's Unreal Fest, hosted this week in New Orleans, to provide more context and details on the recent mass layoffs that affected the company. In a video grabbed by Fortnite creator and shared on Twitter (X), Sweeney admitted that even if the engineering teams were barely affected, there might be a degradation of quality in some of the future work. He also revealed when exactly Epic became aware that it had significant financial problems.

A week after laying off almost 900 employees, Epic Games announced that it's increasing the price to use Unreal Engine—just not for the game development community.

Adobe is teasing a new photo editing engine that uses AI to make moving, modifying, or deleting anything a simple mouse-click operation.

In true Netrunner fashion, you may want to explore 2.0's console commands to open up your gameplay. Whatever your reason, whether it's to assist you in a difficult part of the game, unlock certain endings, or outfit your V with the best gear, console commands can make it happen. The possibilities of what you can accomplish with console commands are practically limitless.

An Immortals of Aveum Unreal Engine 5.2 upgrade is inbound, developer Ascendant Studios has revealed.

Slender: The Arrival's 10-year anniversary Unreal Engine 5 overhaul is turning out to be a lot bigger than I originally expected, just now revealing the one feature fans have wanted most since the original game launched back in 2013: co-op.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Monday that unfair tactics used by Google led to its dominance as a search engine, tactics that in turn have thwarted his company's rival program, Bing.

Hunt: Showdown is getting a native PS5 version in April 2024, developer Crytek has announced, along with an engine upgrade in line with the next CryEngine update. These technical ambitions and more were revealed in a lengthy roadmap video outlining the changes to come, which includes the cessation of support for the PS4 iteration of the game. Previously, a 60 frames-per-second patch was released for PS4; this new version would allow 4K visuals, along with enhanced controller support and input upgrades.

Hunt: Showdown is one of our favourite multiplayer games. If you love dying in bushes, it might be one of yours, too. Developers Crytek have now outlined their roadmap of coming updates between now and the middle of 2024, and it includes an engine upgrade and new minimum specs.

Cyberpunk 2077 marks the end for CD Projekt's REDengine, the in-house technology that it's been building on since 2011's The Witcher 2. Last year, CD Projekt announced that its next Witcher game and other games going forward—including Cyberpunk's sequel, codename Orion—will be developed with Unreal Engine 5.

When Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC launched, it marked the end of REDengine. The development team has been using that engine for years, and their transition to Unreal Engine 5 also meant that the studio would no longer support Cyberpunk 2077. Instead, this launch expansion was the last of the big new content for the game. Now, the focus is on developing future games through Unreal Engine 5. However, if you thought that this shift was difficult, you’d be surprised. We’re finding out that the transition and the content they learned to develop using REDengine is a bit easier to bring onto the new engine. 

An impressive Unreal Engine 5 tech demo was showcased today in a new video, providing a new look at what will be possible to do with the latest version of the engine by Epic Games.

Bloodsucking build 'em up V Rising got its first major Early Access update earlier this year. Its next major update will be its 1.0 release and it will arrive sometime in "the second quarter of 2024", according to a new developer post which also details underway engine upgrades and details features-to-come.

Fortnite and Unreal Engine developer Epic Games is reportedly laying off 16% of its total staff.

There is no denying that Google's position as a search engine is rarely ever challenged. It does not matter what device you own. You will find the same search engine across the board. However, earlier this year, we started hearing how Samsung might remove Google in favor of Microsoft's Bing search engine simply because the latter provides access to its AI capabilities, as well.

Indie developer Neognosis has announced that the Nintendo Switch port of its combat racing game, BallisticNG, has been canceled in light of the recent Unity engine controversy. This comes despite Unity’s apology and further policy amendments, which were announced last Friday (September 22). 

After facing quite a bit of backlash and criticisms for its recent monetisation update, the company behind the ubiquitous Unity engine has released a new updated plan for monetisation going forward, along with an open letter to its community explaining the changes.

In addition to the impressive DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction implementation within Cyberpunk 2077, NVIDIA also gave us a chance to try out its new Ramen Shop tech demo based on Unreal Engine 5 and it was just spectacular.

After the recent slate of indie developers speaking out against Unity’s recently-announced plans to revise how it makes money off games developed using the engine, the company has taken to social media platform X to release a new statement.

From the looks of it, legendary development studio id Software is working on a new version of its proprietary game engine - id Tech 8.

This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.

Series AI has raised $7.9 million in a seed round led by venture capital firm A16z Games.

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

Over $1,000 worth of courses and tutorials to teach you to make 2D and 3D games in the latest versions of Godot.

Among Us could be another major casualty of Unity's new installation fee, which has sparked chaos throughout the games industry since its announcement yesterday. Speaking with IGN, Innersloth programmer Forest Willard confirmed that "pulling Among Us for a while" is on the table while the developer looks for a solution.

The Moore Threads MTT S80 GPU which is designed for the Chinese domestic market is now able to run Unreal Engine 5.

Indie game developers are up in arms over changes to Unity's pricing system that will see them charged on a per-install basis once certain thresholds are met. The developers say the changes could end up costing them more than their games will ever actually make, and worse, leaves them vulnerable to abuse and impacts their ability to take part in game giveaways, bundles, and and even subscription services like Game Pass.

The open-source game development tool Godot has fully launched its titular development fund (GDF) that'll help further its development. 

Publisher Beep Japan, publisher and developer Poppy Works, and developer Protoculture Games have delayed side-scrolling shoot ’em up Devil Engine: Complete Edition from its previously planned October 12 release date to November 9. It will be available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch.

Starfield on PC may have a major IO utilization problem where even the fastest Gen5 SSDs are not safe from the wrath of stuttering, as pointed out by Compusemble.

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

A great value for game devs of all skill levels, including newbies.

After only a week of availability, there are already hundreds of Starfield mods available to download over on NexusMods.

Cursed ship designs were always an inevitability with Starfield, and after two full days in the wild, players have already made some wildly funky and plainly cool ships. Scrolling through social media channels, you’ll find that players have hammered away at their own unique designs while also creatively remaking other iconic vessels from Mass Effect, Star Wars, Halo and, of course, our friend Thomas The Tank Engine. There’s also been a shocking lack of, uhm, male organ-shaped spacecraft which makes putting this post together much less hard. But for now, onward! Let’s admire some cool ships.

Modders have already begun creating Thomas the Tank Engine mods for Starfield. 

Starfield's shipbuilders have gotten out of hand as one player painstakingly replicated Thomas the Tank Engine without using mods. 

Very little is currently known about the Nintendo Switch 2 console, but if the rumors circulating can be believed, it will be quite a step forward from its predecessor, as it will reportedly come with ray tracing capabilities.

The Starfield mod pipe has been gushing out bangers, like one that overhauls the UI and another that adds Nvidia's DLSS, but, until today, none of them have inserted the funny blue train that seems to get modded into every videogame in existence: Thomas the Tank Engine.

What many Bethesda fans have been waiting for has finally happened in Starfield, and that’s the arrival of a Thomas the Tank Engine skin. Although many fans might have suspected that it was going to happen to a ship, or any type of dragon-like enemy, it’s come to an unlikely companion: Vasco.

I am wholly unsure what it is about the internet and Thomas the Tank Engine, but I absolutely love it . From the == brief meme-ry of Choo-Choo Charles to every new game getting a mod where you play as the iconic children’s character. 

Unreal Engine 5.3, the latest version of the engine by Epic, is now available for download to the public following a few months of preview access.

Ring the bell, everybody, it's time for another round of game developers telling players that they don't really understand what a "game engine" is. The spark this time is little-known science fiction adventure Starfield, which I believe we've reported on before. The game has a few obvious foibles - in my experience as a space pirate, NPCs sometimes struggle to navigate their surroundings, and then there are those stark disconnects between planetary surfaces and orbital space. Hiccups such as these have led a few players to wonder whether the game might work better using different technology, and in particular, the newer versions of Epic's ubiquitous Unreal Engine. Isn't Bethesda's proprietary Creation Engine, which the company have been updating since 2011, getting a little long in the tooth?

It took modders less than a day to add CJ from San Andreas to Armored Core 6, and the meme train just keeps rolling down the tracks: I present to you CJ and Thomas the Tank Engine. Together at last. Wait… Yes it is a rather unfortunate confluence of body positions and overall deeply, deeply cursed, but I think we'll leave it there.

Starfield is turning out to be a real loot hoarder's dream. Not only are there oodles of knick-knacks to find, but you're given a big ol' ship to stuff them in. For some, though, it's not about the variety of tat, but seeing how much of one item you can store. Like the fan below, who has absolutely stuffed one room with potatoes. 

Paradox Interactive has, at long last, officially re-revealed Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, with The Chinese Room – known for the likes of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther – taking over as the developer from Hardsuit Labs. And even though plenty of work done by the original developer is still being used for the new project, the new studio in charge has made some significant changes behind the scenes.

At PAX West 2023, Paradox Interactive finally delivered the long-awaited news on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

Remember ol' Slender Man? The dapper, faceless, tall drink of water that more than likely inspired your nightmares a decade ago? Well, he's coming back in a big way with the release of an Unreal Engine 5 overhaul of the 2013 cult classic horror game Slender: The Arrival for current-gen platforms, and now we have a release date.

Gamescom may have only just finished, but there’s another tentpole developer event that’s fast approaching.

Though CD Projekt RED’s initial plan for Cyberpunk 2077’s post-launch seemed to be similar to how the developer handled The Witcher 3, things haven’t quite turned out that way. Where The Witcher 3 received two full-fledged expansions after its launch, last year, CD Projekt RED confirmed that the upcoming Phantom Liberty will be Cyberpunk 2077’s first and only expansion.

Even though Starfield isn’t out yet, there’s been so much content and sneak previews for the game that some people are trying to piece it together ahead of schedule. For example, one person has decided to recreate an outpost styled after the upcoming sci-fi RPG in something other than Bethesda’s in-house engine.

Pacific Drive is one of the fresher, more intriguing prospects on the horizon, and though it was recently delayed into 2024, a new story trailer shown off at Gamescom's Future Games show has us anticipating a post-apocalyptic road trip of our own.

Starfield has yet to be released, and already some talented users have started recreating the next highly anticipated open-world RPG by Bethesda in Unreal Engine 5.

Ultra Pro Wrestling’s showcase has dropped and with it comes the first in-game footage and a metric-ton of roster announcements. We got to see intros that pay homage to Virtual Pro Wrestling 2’s full walkouts from the backstage area to the ring with “Blue Collar” Bill Dollar facing “Sir” Oliver Buckingham. The light and hard strikes and grapples were shown off and the strikes definitely have the same feel as No Mercy in terms of reactions and selling. The grapples seem a tad floaty, but this is pre-alpha footage and that can always be tightened up. The go-behind animation definitely needs some work and the snap German based on one of Dr. Death’s variants in the Aki engine looks pretty good overall.

Denuvo has had quite a bit of flack from the gaming community. It’s a DRM that’s proven to be incredibly popular within the industry. Now, a new update for the DRM might also ruin the ability to mod video games. These are mods that are not malicious as well, so that might hurt quite a big community of players. Details are scarce right now, but here’s what’s being shared online right now, thanks to a report from Wccftech. 

Security software company Denuvo Software Solutions has introduced a new feature that could theoretically make it harder to mod some PC games.

Modding is about to become much more difficult in the near future due to a new Unreal Engine Protection technology that could be used in conjunction with Denuvo or independently.

Someone's finally done it: they put the number three on a co-op zombie FPS. 

Immortals of Aveum is out now, roughly a month after its original release date of July 20th. Developer Ascendant Studios, which debuts in the industry with this first-person sci-fantasy shooter game, had cited the need to polish it further when it delayed the product to August 22nd.  I'm afraid the game would have needed much more than that, at least on a technical level.

The engrossing indie roguelike Vampire Survivors has received a major new update on Steam which adds four-player couch co-op to the game, allowing you to experience the chaos of fighting waves upon waves of night creatures alongside your friends.

We knew it was coming, and now Vampire Survivors' four-player couch co-op mode is live on PC and Xbox, and Nintendo Switch as of this week, too.

Armored Core 6 is just around the corner, and fans are gearing up for their first foray into the mecha action title after a long absence of a new title. Aside from the games looking to be a great time, it also looks to be a goldmine for the modding and datamining communities, as it has been confirmed that Armored Core 6 will use the same engine as Sekiro and Elden Ring.

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

Today, EA has announced what new updates are coming for NHL 24. The game is officially slated to release on October 6 as the season officially starts on October 10. NHL 24 will release on PlayStation 4|5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. A lot of new tech is being implemented into NHL 24 with a focus being on physics and fatigue. Players of HUT and WOC can expect improved cross-play capabilities, HUT Moments to recreate historic moments and a real time objective-tracking system with player progress updates in-game. The big changes that looks to overhaul how the game is played is aimed at the on-ice action.

At long last,Gothic 1 Remake just got a new trailer, this time showing off a modern recreation of the Old Camp. Believe it or not, over two decades on from the original game’s release, this new version looks quite a bit snazzier.

Today, Inworld AI announced it has received a new round of funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and big corporations like Microsoft (through its M12 fund), Samsung Next, and LG (through Technology Ventures). Even Stanford University and Eric Schmidt's First Spark Ventures participated in this investment round. In previous rounds, other big companies and investment funds like Section 32, Intel Capital, Founders Fund, the Disney Accelerator, BITKRAFT Ventures, The Venture Reality Fund, Kleiner Perkins, CRV, Meta, Micron Ventures, NTT Docomo Ventures, and SK Telecom Venture Capital had pitched in.

New rumors claim that an official remaster-turned-remake of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is in the works, some 11 years after fans began remaking the storied RPG on their own. 

Six unannounced characters from Tekken 8's roster have been leaked after one too many closed network tests. 

A closed network test for Tekken 8 was held in July, with an initial run that was exclusively available to Playstation 5 owners followed by a broader test that included players on Steam. Letting PC gamers near Tekken 8 meant that someone fired up Cheat Engine because of course they did, at which point they managed to find a partial roster in the game's files that includes six previously unannounced characters.

Slender: The Arrival is one of the scariest indie horror games I've ever played, and it's coming back with a "huge update" built in Unreal Engine 5 sometime this October.

Tekken 8 fans used Cheat Engine to dig into the game’s files, uncovering a list of potentially unannounced playable characters.

The preview version of Unreal Engine 5.3 is now available for download, allowing users to experience some of the new features and improvements the new version of the engine brings.

There’s nothing quite like a new take on a classic game, and Resident Evil 4 should be no exception. We’ve already encountered enough mods for the remake, so it’s nice to see the 2005 version of Resident Evil 4 still getting some love in 2D form.

Open-source Morrowind engine replacer OpenMW has just hit version 0.48.0. The latest update adds a post-processing shader framework, which means modders will be able to make the 21-year-old RPG look even better, as well as adding a new Lua scripting API. «Both of these features greatly expand what the engine can deliver in terms of visual fidelity and game logic», the OpenMW team says in the release announcement.