Got some news: I'm now working full time on Heart of Mercy, starring @JonathanRoumie ! We're using #UnrealEngine to combine real-life actors with 3D environments. I'll tell you more about it here: https://t.co/VG84ZuCstV
Claude just became a craacked video game designer.
With the launch of Unreal Engine's MCP server last week, you can now build entire video games just by talking to Claude.
I spent the past few days building with it, and I'm telling you, this is going to forever change how video games get made and who gets to make them.
In this video I show you exactly how to set up the Unreal Engine MCP yourself and run through three demos: building a full playable city, cloning a real city from Google Earth, and creating custom buildings in Blender.
Here's the agent harness I mention too: https://t.co/mos9EwnZ2h
Intro
What I built in a few hours
Setting up the Unreal MCP server
Fixing the port 8000 connection issue
The agent harness that avoids the pitfalls
Demo 1: Building a city with City Sample
Demo 2: Cloning a real city from Google Earth with Cesium
Demo 3: Custom buildings with Blender headless
Outro
My biggest pet peeve is when someone gives advice about audio, AND IT'S WRONG ahh
With a degree in Post Production (editing) and 10 years working in the industry for tv, my advice is...
Audio Mixer OBS:
Voice: -5db (THE RED ZONE IS GOOD, never get to 0)
Game: between -20db & -15db (Yellow)
Music: between -45db & -35db (Low Green)
People saying never to put audio in the red zone in OBS are flat out wrong. You want to avoid distortion, which is when it peaks at 0 and above, but your voice should be louder than the game.
Hope this helps!
I really wish Epic properly supported the chaos cloth system, including the latest 5.8 improvements. It’s just really one person from the company that ever posts about it or mentions it. And so it’s been impossible to use for years. https://t.co/ziFPG5aohQ
Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada spoke about the contradictions of human nature:
“Some people dream of having a swimming pool at home, while those who have one hardly ever use it. Those who have lost a loved one feel a profound sense of loss, while others often complain about their living relatives. Those without a partner long for one, while those who have one often don't appreciate it. The hungry would give anything for a meal, while the satiated complain about the taste of their food. Those without a car dream of owning one, while those who have a car are always looking for a better one.”
The key to happiness is gratitude: truly seeing and appreciating what we already have, and understanding that somewhere, someone would give anything for what we take for granted.
I'm sure everyone has heard by now that Unreal 6 won't have a visual scripting system to replace Blueprint once it's deprecated and removed. Some people in my Discord mentioned how Godot handles their system so I created this ("Visual Verse").
It's still early, but covers the whole Verse library of functions and language features (core, Unreal and Fortnite) and supports reroutes, type based context filtering for the node palette.
Still more to do but the end goal is to have a visual scripting system AND solve the "no way to merge" issue of binary Blueprints.
I will eventually be putting this on Fab once UE6 drops with Verse support, possibly with a "Lite" version for free with some team-facing features stripped out.
#UnrealEngine #Verse
A houseplant just changed everything we thought we knew about consciousness.
In 1966, Cleve Backster, a CIA interrogation specialist with a polygraph machine, was looking for ways to time how long it took different substances to travel up through plant tissue.
So, he attached electrodes to a dracaena plant in his office and watered it, expecting to see the electrical conductivity change as water moved up the stem.
Instead, the polygraph needle started tracing the exact pattern it makes when a human experiences an emotional response.
Backster stared at the readout. Plants don't have nervous systems. They don't have brains. The signal made no biological sense. So he decided to test something that made even less sense. He walked across the room, looked at the plant, and thought about burning one of its leaves with a match.
The instant the thought formed in his mind, before he moved toward the plant, before he struck a match, before he did anything physical, the polygraph exploded into frantic activity.
The plant was responding to his intention.
What happened next launched thousands of experiments and split the scientific community for decades.
Backster discovered that plants reacted to direct threats and to threats against other living things in their environment. When he dropped live brine shrimp into boiling water in another room, plants throughout the building registered distress responses at the exact moment of death. Distance didn't matter. Shielding the plants in lead containers didn't matter. The response was instantaneous and consistent.
Mainstream botanists dismissed the findings immediately. Plants process information through chemical signals and growth responses, without electrical consciousness. Any electrical activity was just random fluctuation or experimental error. The peer review system buried Backster's work. His credentials were questioned. His methods were called sloppy.
But the experiments kept working. Other researchers, following Backster's protocols, got the same results. Plants hooked to EEG machines showed brain wave patterns. They responded to music, to human emotions, to the intentions of people they had never been exposed to before. The electrical signatures were clear, measurable, and repeatable.
The implications were so uncomfortable that most of academic science simply refused to engage. If plants were somehow conscious, if they could sense intentions and respond to the emotional states of humans and other living things, consciousness was spread beyond brains. It was distributed across organized living systems rather than produced by neural networks.
Backster stumbled onto evidence that living systems might be constantly communicating through channels we don't have instruments to measure yet. The polygraph was crude enough to detect the electrical signatures of that communication without being sophisticated enough to explain them away.
Quantum biologists now suspect that living cells operate through quantum coherence processes that classical biology can't account for. Birds navigate using quantum entanglement in their visual systems. Plants conduct photosynthesis using quantum superposition to find the most efficient energy pathways. Maybe Backster's plants were demonstrating quantum consciousness, responding to information that was quantum entangled with the intentions and emotional states of nearby living systems.
What keeps most people awake when they learn about this work is realizing that if consciousness extends beyond brains, every living thing around you is potentially aware of your mental and emotional state in ways you never considered. The plant in your room. The bacteria in your gut. The ecosystem you walk through.
You think your thoughts are private.
The plants have been listening the entire time.
Another thought about depreciating visual scripting:
When you have Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 be made entirely through visual scripting and become a generational game of the year, why would you not lean into, embrace, support, and expand the systems that made such a success possible?
You have literal best-sellers being made entirely through visual scripting and I can guarantee many developers who cannot navigate direct code will explore other visual scripting options to keep their workflow as simple as possible.
This just isn’t a good decision, especially when you have IP’s literally showcasing the raw power and magnitude of success that comes from it.
Bobby Prince, the legendary composer behind games such as DOOM, DOOM II, Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem 3D, has sadly passed away.
May he rest in peace ❤️
Cinematographers learn 12 camera moves in film school.
Most AI creators don't know a single one. Because nobody told the camera what to do.
.
.
Here they are:
→ Push-in — moves toward the subject
Builds tension. Creates intimacy. Use it slowly.
→ Pull-back — retreats to reveal
Isolation. Scale. Endings. The reveal shot.
→ Pan — horizontal rotation, camera stays fixed
Suspense lives in what you haven't shown yet.
→ Tilt — vertical version of the pan
Tilt up on a hero. They look powerful immediately.
→ Tracking shot — camera travels with the subject
Energy. Forward motion. You feel like you're there.
→ Arc / orbit — circles the subject
Hero moments. Product showcases. Keep it under 30 degrees.
→ Crane / jib — sweeps vertically on a boom
Grandeur. Scale. The "god-view" of cinematography.
→ Zoom — focal length changes, camera doesn't move
Flatter look than a dolly. Fast zoom = music video energy.
→ Dolly zoom — camera goes one way, lens goes the other
Background warps. Subject stays still. Pure psychological dread.
→ Whip pan / crash zoom — extreme speed for transitions
Shock. Comedy. Stops the scroll every time.
→ Handheld — natural shake, no stabilisation
Add "subtle" or the model goes full earthquake.
→ Static + angles — low, high, Dutch, bird's-eye, worm's-eye
Low angle = power.
Dutch angle = unease.
Bird's-eye = scale.
The mistake everyone makes: stacking multiple moves into one prompt. One move. One clip. Always.
And add "slow" to almost everything. Slow moves hide what AI can't render cleanly. Fast moves expose every flaw.
You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.
You thought it was you. It is not you.
Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.
Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.
The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.
Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.
What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.
Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.
They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.
The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."
The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.
This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.
The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.
Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.
My wife and I were talking last night about groceries.
I went back into my Walmart app and pulled up an order from January 2020.
30 items. $70.20.
I added every single one back to the cart today.
$165.42.
Same 30 items. Same store. Same cart.
$95 more, In six years.
They told us inflation was temporary. They told us it was under control. They told us the economy was recovering.
My grocery bill didn’t get the memo.
135% increase in six years and nobody in Washington has missed a single meal.
You move two files into a sub-folder, then wait 45mins for #UnrealEngine to "rename assets" in 600+ other folders. Quality design by the people who brought you FAB. #fail
Today we introduced Daz Studio 6, the most significant update to Daz Studio in years.
The new release includes Victoria AI Chat, faster asset loading, improved content organization, viewport updates, support for the latest NVIDIA GPUs, strand-based hair editing, and new tools for managing large content libraries.
Daz Studio 6 is available now. You can read the announcement here: https://t.co/ohX4ichwEu
#Daz3D #3DArt #GameDev