Lars Thießen

Something Like Games | Using graphic formats correctly in game development Which graphics formats are suitable for which steps in game development? A structured overview from texture creation to engine import and runtime.

I just finished my next article. After so many Linux articles, it's time to get back to the original topics: www.somethinglikegames.de/en/blog/2026...
I'm curious to see how much I'll have to correct in the next few days 😄 So feel free to correct me

#GameDev #Graphics #Textures #Pipeline

The curios case of Unreal’s slow asset reimport notification If you are reading this blog, there is a good chance that you are also an Unreal Engine user. Which also means, that you have probably seen this innocuous looking notfication: This notification is …

It's been a while since my last Unreal Engine optimization article, so it's nice to have an impactful change to write about for my newest: Figuring out why the automatic asset reimport tanks the framerate (and how to fix it):
larstofus.com/2026/02/14/t...
#ue5 #gamedev #optimization #superluminal

Spore (Feb 19, 2008 prototype) A build of Spore dated Feb 19, 2008, six months before the final build, with numerous differences to the final and many debug tools.

TIL that a advanced version of Spore (2008) was leaked this year, including the full debug symbols(!)
This means reverse-engineering the game should be much easier now and we have a (very small) chance to see an OpenSpore project somewhere in the future 🙏

hiddenpalace.org/Spore_(Feb_1...

When you import 56 KB of icons into Unreal to get 3.7 MB of uassets 😵‍💫
Obviously 3.7 MB of assets are not a problem worth investigating, but at the same time a size increase to 6600% seems too weird to not look into... 🧐

Energy Saving Plugin This plugin for Unreal helps you to reduce your game's power consumption by adjusting several settings if no input gets detected over some time.What does the plugin do?Every frame, the plugin checks h...

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

Oh, I think I seen that before but forgot about it since at that time I was a Windows user only. Will give it a try👍

I just learned after writing the article that Kubuntu in fact does have a swap space, but it's set to 1GB by default, which seems way to low for me. And changing it's is seemingly more complicated than under windows, because it uses it's own partition, but at least it's fixable :)

Yes, the changeable swap size was mentioned a lot to me, but it's wild to me that the default is apparently set to just 1 GB 😵‍💫

When working with Unreal, 16 GB is actually a really low amount, the official recommendations start at 32 GB and go up to 256 GB for heavier workloads

I tried to use Unreal on Linux… it’s rough Like most game developers, I am mainly a Windows user. Not so much by choice, but just because it is the default that most tools and basically all the games are developed for. That being said, I al…

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

Nope, I can write my own bugs.

Good to see I'm not the only one 😀

I was todays years old that you can write 'and', 'or', and 'not' in C++ instead of &&, || and !.
I will probably never do it, since it looks extremly wrong to my eyes, but objectively this seems to be the more readable/clear option.

GitHub - HaukeThiessen/EnergySavingPlugin: Unreal plugin to save energy by reducing max fps and screen percentage when no input is detected or the window loses focus. Based on https://cdn2.unrealengin... Unreal plugin to save energy by reducing max fps and screen percentage when no input is detected or the window loses focus. Based on https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/reducing-fortnites-power-consumpti...

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

A cropped screenshot of an out-of-memory-warning shown by Ubuntu.

I'm currently trying to use Unreal on Linux. It's a bumpy ride so far, in part because I am only using an older laptop for this test and 16 GB RAM is CLEARLY not enough anymore. My experience can be summarized in one single picture.

Efficiently sorting gigabytes: the Deferred Merge Sort - Superluminal % The problem One of the biggest challenges in building Superluminal is scalability. No matter how large a capture file is, it shouldn’t affect framerate, memory usage, or lookup times. This constraint ...

New year, new post! Jelle wrote an article about how we efficiently ingest gigabytes of unsorted data in sorted order. It's got fancy animations about our algorithm, so there's really no excuse not to take a peek.

Happy New Year!

superluminal.eu/efficiently-...

Cropped screenshot of Git Cola: A dialogue that asks for a username, but labels the text field for this username as "Password", including a "Remember password" checkbox.

I'm currently trying some different git clients. Git Cola surely wins the award for most confusing login process (so far). This is how it asks for the username:

At least it was a one-line fix: github.com/EpicGames/Un...

Fun fact: Since 5.4, Unreal refuses to rename widgets in the UMG editor if the old and the new name only differ in case.
So renaming a "textLabel" to "TextLabel" is impossible. But renaming it via a third name works "textLabel" -> "SomeLabel" -> "TextLabel"

A cropped screenshot from the game "Necromunda: Hired Gun", showing an input prompt: "[ESC] Confirm"

There should be a law against binding a confirmation action to the escape key (Seen in Necromunda: Hired Gun)

I just saw his linkedIn-update, and luckily you are right, he confirmed that this isn't planned now.
It's still annoying that he frames it as people reading between the lines if his original (and still available) post clearly states the opposite :/

Microsoft is using AI to purge C and C++ from its codebase by 2030 Microsoft is leveraging AI agents to automate the massive task of migrating its legacy codebases to the more secure Rust language.

Ok, that's enough! Microsoft wants to REPLACE it's ENTIRE codebase over the next four(!) years... Even without using hallucinating AI this would be a stupid idea beyond comprehension!
Any suggestions for an easy-to-use Linux distribution I can switch to?
www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/wi...

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

From profiling to kernel patch: the journey to an eBPF performance fix | Ritesh Oedayrajsingh Varma A story about how an innocent profiling session led to a change to the Linux kernel that makes eBPF map-in-map updates much faster.

New article! What do you do when profiling your code shows the slowdown isn't in your code, but deep in the kernel? Why, you grab the kernel source and go spelunking.

How a routine profiling session turned into a Linux kernel patch: rovarma.com/articles/fro...

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

Support the development of Godot! Donate Now

This has been a great year for the engine, but there are still a lot of things we would love to do.

If each person visiting our website donated €5, we could hire 5 more developers to work on Godot full-time.

👉 fund.godotengine.org

Ever wondered how to store millions of call stacks efficiently? So did we. Many times.

Check out this new article by Jelle about designing a data structure to efficiently compress and store large amounts of call stack data!

superluminal.eu/compressing-...

That's an instant subscribe 🥳

I wouldn't say that I'm opposed to new tech in general, but yesterday I had to update the firmware of all our light switches(!) one by one, because some of them stopped working out of nowhere and now the light in the bed room can't be turned off anymore 😤

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...