The Grumbling Loner

#indiegamedev on #unrealengine, #telecom engineer IRL, PhD in #drone swarming, I love #space, #AR/#VR and good western #RPG

[UploadVR @UploadVR]

UploadVR's Ian Hamilton and David Heaney went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ, trying both standalone use and PC VR.

Read their impressions here: https://t.co/Xer2HWZSx3

[Ben Lang @benz145]

The Steam Frame 'core module' is tiny, weighing in at just 190 grams. The core module architecture means this thing is going to get modded until the end of time. Sharing photos of a prototype with a translucent shell that's unfortunately not going to be commercially available 🥲. Check out all of our Frame coverage: https://t.co/ax4wHKBQOl

[Road to VR @RtoVR]

Hands-on: Steam Frame Reveals Valve's Modern Vision for VR and Growing Hardware Ambitions

See more 👉 https://t.co/yzhRMIFb5V

[Kiaran Ritchie @kiaran_ritchie]

It appears that Vertex Block Descent is going to dethrone XPBD as the defacto standard method to simulate softbody AND rigidbody physics in realtime.

AVBD appears super robust and highly parallelizable.

Definitely going to experiment with this one!
https://t.co/7GbF9W0kYz

[The Grumbling Loner @GrumblingLoner]

AI/ML is never boring, even largely exposed papers like the recent one from Apple can be rebutted. That went fast in this case, though. (TBC of course)

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

A follow-up study on Apple's "Illusion of Thinking" Paper is published now.

Shows the same models succeed once the format lets them give compressed answers, proving the earlier collapse was a measurement artifact.

Token limits, not logic, froze the models.

Collapse vanished once the puzzles fit the context window.

So Models failed the rubric, not the reasoning.

⚙️ The Core Concepts

Large Reasoning Models add chain-of-thought tokens and self-checks on top of standard language models. The Illusion of Thinking paper pushed them through four controlled puzzles, steadily raising complexity to track how accuracy and token use scale. The authors saw accuracy plunge to zero and reasoned that thinking itself had hit a hard limit.

📊 Puzzle-Driven Evaluation

Tower of Hanoi forced models to print every move; River Crossing demanded safe boat trips under strict capacity. Because a solution for forty-plus moves already eats thousands of tokens, the move-by-move format made token budgets explode long before reasoning broke.

🔎 Why Collapse Appeared

The comment paper pinpoints three test artifacts: token budgets were exceeded, evaluation scripts flagged deliberate truncation as failure, and some River Crossing instances were mathematically unsolvable yet still graded. Together these artifacts masqueraded as cognitive limits.

✅ Fixing the Test

When researchers asked the same models to output a compact Lua function that generates the Hanoi solution, models solved fifteen-disk cases in under five thousand tokens with high accuracy, overturning the zero-score narrative.

[Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic]

Indeed Unreal Engine is moving to Left-Up-Forward coordinates everywhere, starting with UEFN, and coming to UE5-6 in an incrementally-adoptable way through UI settings and C++ helper functions/macros to ease the transition.

This will align Unreal with Y-Up, right handed standards of USD and glTF.

Why? Because future 3d tools and ecosystems will be increasingly interoperable and standards-based. There are a lot of missing standards we’ll need to propose, and Team Unreal will be far more successful proposing new things if we adopt and add to existing standards and conventions.

The USD-glTF-Maya-Houdini quadrant is the center of mass for complex code-art-pipeline tooling that is highly sensitive to coordinates. (Flipping coordinates when exporting from AutoCAD or Blender is easy enough; changing a movie vfx pipeline is not).

Coordinates based on project settings sound like a have-it-your-way compromise but are a combinatorial mess when projects are a mix of code modules and content packages from many independent authors.

The best time to make this change would have been 1995, but I believe the second best time is now with the launch of Scene Graph in UEFN.

[Unreal Engine @UnrealEngine]

Today’s the day: State of Unreal is nearly here. It’s only one hour away, in fact.

Grab your snacks, make yourself comfortable and get ready for what’s next in the Epic Ecosystem🤩
https://t.co/W3KfuoU10w

[Kiaran Ritchie @kiaran_ritchie]

You can now sculpt correctives right in-engine. And then drive them at run-time with a Spherical Pose Reader!

[80 LEVEL @80Level]

Unreal Engine 5.7 Main is now live, featuring a built-in MetaHuman Creator plug-in with auto-rigging and other new features.

Learn more: https://t.co/NRUCKJqWG2

Video by Anderson Rohr

[Brad Lynch @SadlyItsBradley]

Valve accidentally pushed a SteamVR beta tonight

It confirmed that SteamVR Link streaming from Linux PCs is coming soon™️. 13,824 lines of driver code

Other notable findings: more Deckard room setup/tracking strings

Valve rolled back the update 4 minutes after publishing it 🫡

[Nathie @nathie]

This incredibly thin haptic patch lets you feel interactions in VR and AR, imagine wearing a full suit or gloves made of these.

Source: https://t.co/LrAudPBb99

[80 LEVEL @80Level]

Andras Ketzer unveiled a new demo of Unreal Engine 5's @FluidNinjaLIVE 2.0 pre-alpha, showcasing water repulsion using Mesh Distance Fields.

See more: https://t.co/KC9tYJIdCk

[FR3NKD @FR3NKD]

Oh, yes! the good old SubD Boolean workfl...Wait what?!

[Road to VR @RtoVR]

Despite Years of Reports to the Contrary, PC VR Just Won't Die—In fact, It's Growing

Read the analysis 👉 https://t.co/WBHP9VJ0GS

[Blender 🔶 @Blender]

Blender Foundation and the online developers community proudly present Blender 4.4! 🚀

A massive milestone in stability, with over 700 issues fixed and packed with features. Ready for production.

✨ What's new: https://t.co/NNZuPkU8uY
🧡 Donate: https://t.co/EG5fFJY2Fn #b3d

[Pasquale Scionti @scionti_design]

Check out my Tutorial created for Nvidia on how to Bake Lightmaps and Lighting a Sci-Fi interior inspired by Alien
Unreal Engine 5.3
Will show the process on how to bake lightmaps and settings, color grading , final Cinematic and Gameplay. 👇

Project tutorial and more details on Artstation https://t.co/svBjhVsQtz

#ue5 #UnrealEngine5 #lighting #tutorial #scifi #cinematic #NVIDIA #trailer #Videogame #videogames #artstation #unrealengine #lightmaps #Aliens @UnrealEngine @ArtStationHQ @NVIDIAStudio @nvidia @80Level

[Brad Lynch @SadlyItsBradley]

Valve is now working on bringing Steam Link to HTC’s Vive Focus 3/Vision, as well as Bytedance’s Pico HMDs

ALSO more references to the “SteamVR Link Dongle” hardware device appeared

Valve is making it to ease the process of directly connecting your headset to your PC wirelessly

[Game From Scratch @gamefromscratch]

It's time for free #UnrealEngine assets again! The Fab Bi-Monthly giveaway is here with 3 free assets (MSRP over $1100 this month!) available until March 25th. Can be exported to #GodotEngine, #Unity3d, etc. so hoard away!

https://t.co/oqoTEq3enG

#gamedev #Indiedev

[Ari Arnbjörnsson @flassari]

Shader stutters in your game, how do you fix them??

We made a live-stream, an article, and a blog post to get into the nitty-gritty: https://t.co/BtWYQESTz2

But that's a lot of text and video, just follow these takeaways from the end of the article 👇 #uetips

[Road to VR @RtoVR]

Valve's Standalone XR Headset 'Deckard' Reportedly Launching This Year at $1,200, Leaker Claims

See more 👉https://t.co/FEg68RC1aZ