"Vibe your way to $50k: the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam" Really?

As a UE 5 game developer, who participates in the jam every year, my jaw almost hit the floor when I saw this.

I knew Epic was trying to push AI, but this is crazy. Apparently when they first launched the game jam page / info, using AI was a requirement in the rules.

I just feel so embarrassed using Unreal. The optics are terrible. I used to be proud to develop with the engine, but I just find this in such poor taste.

The amount of money they are offering as rewards is also very high for a game jam. Clearly they want to use this as an example of what is possible with AI. I just can't dance with the devil like that, though the money is tempting.

Following up on my previous Unreal Engine X post, I’ve put together another update to my custom UE5 fork. It’s now based on Unreal Engine 5.8.4, with NVIDIA Flow integration, further rendering work and improvements to the optional ImGui editor interface.

NVIDIA Flow

The main addition this time is NVIDIA Flow, a GPU fluid simulation library for volumetric effects. It uses a sparse 3D grid to simulate fluid motion and combustion.

The integration supports fire, smoke, dust, fog, steam, gas and vortex effects, along with wind and world collision. Collision uses simplified scene shapes, with approximations for more complex geometry.

This short demo focuses on fire: Video Demo

Rendering changes

• Restored legacy ray-traced reflections. Comaprison With HW Lumen
• Added Opacity Micromaps integration. (NVRTX)
• Further Visibility Buffer improvements. In my latest TROPICS test, async mode 2 is slightly faster than the legacy rendering path. This is a result from that particular foliage test, rather than a general performance win.

Engine changes

• Updated the fork to UE 5.8.4, including its Advanced Shader Delivery workflow support.
• Added selected UE6 backports covering CPU performance, Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, Vulkan and correctness fixes. Full List Here
• Added plugin module exclusion through Unreal Build Tool.

Editor changes

There’s also more work on XDash and the optional ImGui editor presentation, including the Content Browser, Outliner and Details panel. These views continue to use Unreal’s editing models and commands, with native controls retained where needed. Check here

Experimental multi-adapter support

This remains experimental. It needs more testing to establish which workloads benefit from a second GPU after accounting for synchronization and data transfer costs.

Source: https://github.com/mad-ben/UnrealEngine

I m using UE5.8 and all the volumetric clouds which i have are like grainy. Is this due to my hardware limits?

Cpu: intel i3 1115G4

Intel UHD 128MB dedicated VRAM (very powerful xd)

8gb ram

This has been a goal of mine since I started developing tools and working as a freelancer.

Finally managed to release my first game.

Regardless of uncertain feature of video game industry and low sales I'm celebrating this event.

Here is google play link if you want to check it out

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aurelion.wildcruise

I am streaming in a smooth voxel island and surrounding it with the water plugins WaterBodyOcean. The island is fine, but when the island dips in to the water smoothly I get tearing where part of the water mesh is lifted up. Steep angles seem fine for some reason, I assume its sampling the z at given points and misses it.

The island is a series of procedural mesh pieces. I've tried disabling affects terrain, collision, and everything else that seemed likely. No luck.

Does anyone happen to have experience with the plugin and know what to check?

I've been developing tools for Unreal Engine multiplayer projects, and I recently combined three of my plugins into a single bundle on Fab. The bundle is called Multiplayer Toolkit for Unreal Engine.

It includes three systems:

Scar Achievements & Platform Services -
Achievements, stats, leaderboards, friends, sessions, cloud saves, rich presence, and platform overlays, with Steam and EOS support.

ScarMultiSession -
Session management, matchmaking, lobbies, and automatic travel into matches, with support for Steam, EOS, LAN, and other Online Subsystem providers.

Scar Core Communication System -
Server-authoritative text chat, voice chat, push-to-talk, quick messages, player muting, voice controls, and live ping.

The reason I grouped them together is that these are three areas developers may need to handle when building an online multiplayer game. I wanted to offer them together rather than make developers find each system separately.

The bundle is available with a Personal license for $24.99 or a Professional license for $39.99.

Here's the full listing:
https://www.fab.com/bundles/681b83ff-8f7a-4080-a504-15aa668a97d2

Since I build these plugins myself, I'm interested in hearing from developers who have worked with Unreal's multiplayer systems. What's been the biggest headache in your multiplayer projects: sessions and matchmaking, platform integration, or in-game communication? I'd especially appreciate hearing what you think is missing from existing tools.

New to using unreal engine, and i have a problem with a mesh flickering/disappearing only in the editor, it started flickering after i reimported it with dialogue, it doesn't flicker in my viewport, only in the mesh editor, and when i try to create a new geometry collection to make a destructible, it justs disappears

Yes I am aware you can make any genre in Unreal.

I've been making an RTS for a while now and I've noticed that most resources are intended for third person games or first person shooters.

What do You think is the most rare genre of game built in Unreal? Puzzle? Visual Novel?

A newer engine version doesn't automatically mean an easier production pipeline.

During the console port of Poppy Playtime Chapter 2, the project was migrated from Unreal Engine 4.27 to 5.4. The upgrade brought access to newer functionality, but it also introduced physics issues that needed a full system update.

There were other platform-specific challenges too. The original lighting setup relied on ray tracing, which wasn't available on the target consoles, so the team switched to static lighting and baked it wherever possible. High draw call counts and complex geometry also required additional optimization.

What I find interesting is that these problems weren't solved by one magic setting. They needed changes across several parts of the project, while preserving the look and feel of the original game.

For those who've migrated a production project between major Unreal Engine versions: what broke in ways you didn't anticipate, and what would you do differently next time?

Had a lot of fun driving through scattered assets and it was relatively simple to set up too! Happy to answer questions here or in the YT comments. Thanks for taking a look, hope it helps.

Here is the full trailer of our True pixel art 3D plugin:

We started creating this plugin after seeing the trailers of Project Shadowglass as well as the recent 3d pixel art discoveries of Dylan Ebert and Lunar Blank, and after 3 month of hard work we are happy to release our plugin featuring an advanced cubemap based pixel art rendering system that focus on rendering Pixel art in First Person View (also third / top down) in a Stable way ( No flickering due to 3D movement ).

You can test it out here (Tech demo): https://averdrian0.itch.io/true-pixel-art-3d-tech-demo

And get the plugin here: https://www.fab.com/listings/3a9f54a9-6514-4de7-a212-1955f903061f

Music used in video: space cadet by congusbongus

;]

Is there a memory cap or something for the editing software? It appears that the program is reaching 7GB around and stopping. So my total usage of everything running is only 25%.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oBv6G8vdFdg&si=hSj8O4u4bJgEYTbY

Hello I introduce to you my very first FAB Pack!

Medieval Combat System Vol. 1 is a complete third-person medieval combat package designed for Unreal Engine.

It includes a fully playable Knight, 5 unique Skeleton enemies, 135 animations, melee and ranged combat systems, synchronized finishers, dynamic hit reactions, enemy variations, spells, weapons, interactive props, VFX and environment assets.

The entire system is built with Blueprints and designed to be modular and extensible, making it easy to integrate individual mechanics into your own project.

A fully playable demo is included so you can immediately explore and test the different systems.

The Demo Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KsOVteRz2MuwR_7t51tJU6SPT9PBdbFA/view

Dear Earthlings,

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Weirder resolution : For some strange reason it resolved on its own. The duplicated BP stopped mirroring the code from 1st BP (basically acting as it's instance and got back to showing the new code I had put in it (I had also compiled and saved it before this weird syncing). *weird*

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Weird bugs are happening in 5.8. Any one has seen these?

1. I duplicated a BP. Now when I change one bp the other one changes the same way too. It is not even a child to the other.
2. I can right click copy a property but it has stopped pasting.
3. Copying from a level and then opening and pasting it in another level was crashing UE. (This I fixed with many mix bag of trick but time got wasted)

Hi everyone!

I'm looking for an old tutorial series by Karl Lewis on YouTube about creating an immersive first-person shooter in Unreal Engine 4.

The series was published on his website, karllewisdesign.com, and covered topics such as true first-person character setup, hand IK, aiming down sights, projectile firing, procedural recoil, and manual shotgun reloading.

Unfortunately, some of the original pages appear to be unavailable, and I haven't been able to find complete archived copies through the Wayback Machine.

I'm trying to find the entire tutorial series, including all parts, articles, screenshots, diagrams, and any downloadable project files that might have accompanied it.

Here are some of the parts I've identified so far:

• Part 1 – Intent, Setup & True First Person Character
• Part 2 – Hand IK and Deadzone Rotation
• Part 3 – Aiming Down Sights
• Part 4 – Firing Projectiles and Controlling the Pump Action
• Part 5 – Procedural Recoil Animations
• Part 6 – Manual Reloading Controls

If anyone has saved copies of these articles, PDFs, screenshots, backups, or knows of another website where the series is still available, I'd be extremely grateful if you could share them.

Even incomplete copies or archived pages of individual parts would be very helpful!

I'm particularly interested in preserving the original tutorials rather than finding generic alternatives, since the specific implementation details are what make this series valuable.

Thanks in advance!

when moving into new tiles it lags/freezes, only happens when moving fast it seems but even then i feel like it shouldnt lag laoding a tile or 2. for more detils feel free to ask me!

Hi all!

If you ever wanted AgX tonemapper which works in both SDR and HDR, here you go: https://www.fab.com/listings/c6218605-2f1e-4cb9-a45a-d94fba669b90

Typical HDR versions of AgX usually: a) don't exist; b) use SDR to HDR expansion, thus loosing data (as seen in The Witcher 3 Remastered or GTA6). This version, inspired by work in Blender, correctly works in pure HDR. Not only that, but:

• it preserves all features of UE post-processing, so you can fully use the post-processing settings
• doesn't overwrite any engine shaders
• has 3 typical AgX presets
• supports blue correction, so bright blue doesn't become purple (as seen in GTA6)
• tons of other features as listed in the plugin description

Here you can find jxr comparison screenshots for 1500nit peak (note: viewing on a SDR monitor will skew the colors). Here are some graphs:

https://media.fab.com/image_previews/gallery_images/b35c1c5f-eb5a-4e11-9b33-988549666a8d/8aa15162-7a3f-4ea2-ba01-dff6f1471e1e.jpg

https://media.fab.com/image_previews/gallery_images/21eaabe0-e9a7-4d22-8b35-bb54facc45b2/74e4ce36-820e-4987-ad37-eeff51908297.jpg

https://media.fab.com/image_previews/gallery_images/38773078-4de6-484d-8fa4-fda785544b9a/5cdfe562-e24a-4ddb-a9dd-e54fc07c6fa8.jpg

https://media.fab.com/image_previews/gallery_images/ec3c713e-4825-4e06-aee8-b57508763c6d/e6892d0f-e446-4968-b506-ef3589f67bd2.jpg

Enjoy!

If anyone is interested in checking it out or wishlisting, here is our Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5276090/Upstellar/ Any feedback is welcome!

Honestly at this point I don’t think I’m over thinking this mega grant I was gonna try to attend next year honestly I came to consideration I’m not getting picked seems like everyone that attends has a full fledged demo I was gonna show my small test which would’ve been 30-40 seconds don’t get me wrong it would’ve show me using epics systems and showing what makes my game different then others but god damn I looked at epic grants and people getting denied left and right and there games looking damn near finished it’s sad I’m gonna have to give up my dream my fault definitely should’ve started back in the day like back in 2020 3rd person Rougelike but damn wouldn’t matter anyway people are charging a lot if you wanted to hire them but I just wanted to say if you have a good game I hope you can make it come true also kinda wish epic makes it a lot more clear and who actually can attend atleast that’s all.

Hi, here is a presentation of the Aero 360 model from my racing game. The game features futuristic modes of transport—ranging from flying cars and levitating motorcycles to space-faring rockets. You’ll experience something far beyond traditional track racing; in a lawless city, escaping from enemies is a common occurrence, and only technological advancement can grant you dominance over your rivals. The game is a strategic team-racing simulator, where you must leverage your team’s greatest strengths to secure victory.