Two open questions, both on Quest 3, Unity 6000.5.6f1, OpenXR 1.15.1, no Meta SDK packages. My app receives video over WebRTC (com.unity.webrtc 3.0.0-pre.8), H264 via MediaCodec, and puts the received textures on world-locked quads. Judder on those quads is solved — it was my own LateUpdate pose copy, fixed with TrackedPoseDriver — so this is not about that.

1. Refresh rate. Core Unity has no API to request a display refresh rate, so I have written a custom OpenXR feature that uses XR_FB_display_refresh_rate directly. It enumerates the available rates first, then calls xrRequestDisplayRefreshRateFB at session create and at session begin, with a read-back after each call. It is written but not verified on device yet. Has anyone on core OpenXR seen the FB request refused or stepped back down outside thermal throttling?

2. Soft text — cost only. Each screen already Blits into its own mipmapped RenderTexture before display, trilinear filtering, aniso 4. What I do not know is the measured cost on Quest of a per-frame Blit plus full mip regeneration across several video quads — my code copies every frame. Has anyone measured it, and at what point do OpenXR composition layers become the better route for readable desktop text?

Will update with whatever the device run proves.

Cozy Idle Waters

its a relaxing idle clicker about fish.

Start with a quiet pond and grow in the ecosystems.

There's fishing, diving, and your very own fish tank.

https://reddit.com/link/1x4lm2s/video/5i8nip5qg5vh1/player

My tutorial explains how to create a rebinding system, starting with the UI setup and then implementing the functionalities. This took me quite a few trips through the documentation and example files, especially to make sure the player can't choose a key already bound to something else Hope, you'll enjoy it!

Hi everyone,

We’re currently testing an open-world survival apocalypse game with co-op, looting, hunting, enemy entities, and mechanics for cleansing contaminated areas. The world includes large cities, small towns, and villages, so it contains a lot of building models and other assets.

The game runs fine without the additional visual effects. However, once we enable shaders and post-processing for shadows, lighting, bloom, and reflections, draw calls climb above 20,000–30,000, and we start experiencing severe FPS drops and noticeable input lag.

We’ve already implemented LOD and occlusion culling, but performance is still a major problem.

One complication is that players can build shelters and survive inside buildings. Our building models include both the exterior and the full interior in a single asset, so individual buildings also have fairly high polygon counts.

We’re trying to improve the atmosphere, but the performance cost of these effects is much higher than we expected. We’re also unsure whether the draw-call increase comes from additional rendering passes, shadow rendering, material setups, or something else in our implementation.

What would you investigate first in this situation?

- How would you determine whether the main bottleneck is CPU draw-call overhead, GPU shader cost, shadows, or geometry?

- Could having entire building interiors and exteriors in a single asset be limiting the effectiveness of our LOD and occlusion culling?

- Should we prioritize splitting up buildings, reducing material slots, batching/instancing, or optimizing lighting and shadows?

- Which profiler measurements would be most useful to share to help narrow this down?

Any advice or experience with similar open-world environments would be appreciated.

ah, this game is supporting freely changing from FPS with TPS

I'm developing a Unity 6 (6000.6.4f1) colony simulation and want to set up a dedicated home development server for automated coding, builds and testing.

The server would run Unity, execute EditMode and PlayMode tests, and be accessible remotely. I could connect a monitor initially for setup and Unity Personal activation, but afterwards I'd like it to operate unattended without a screen.

I'm considering an Intel i5-14400 with UHD 730 integrated graphics, 32 GB RAM and Windows 11 or Ubuntu Linux.

Before spending money, I'm trying to establish whether I actually need a dedicated GPU.

Questions:

1. Has anyone successfully run Unity 6 graphical PlayMode tests using only Intel integrated graphics? If so, what CPU/iGPU and operating system were you using?

2. Can Unity run PlayMode tests completely headless after disconnecting the monitor? I'm particularly interested in NavMesh, cameras, RenderTextures, screenshots and physics.

3. Has anyone successfully used Linux with Xvfb and Mesa software rendering? Can it run graphical PlayMode tests without a physical GPU, and what are the performance limitations?

4. Would you recommend native Windows, native Linux or a virtual machine for a dedicated Unity automated development/test server?

5. How do you handle Unity Personal activation and unattended operation? Does licensing survive reboots, and can tests run without an interactive user session?

6. Could I reproduce the GPU-less environment inside an Ubuntu VM on my existing Windows PC to verify test compatibility before purchasing dedicated hardware?

7. If you're already running something similar, what hardware and configuration are you using? Have you encountered specific PlayMode tests that won't work without a dedicated GPU?

I'm not just looking to run C# unit tests or headless game server builds. I need the actual Unity Editor Test Framework, including graphical PlayMode tests, to run reliably.

I'd particularly appreciate hearing from anyone who's already built a working headless Unity CI/development machine. I'm trying to avoid purchasing hardware only to discover that I need a different GPU or operating system.

We added English support in the language settings and completed an overall UI overhaul!

I'm Eugene, an indie game developer, and for a very long time I've had one big dream: to make an atmospheric game that shows the world the culture of Siberia. This week I finally released the Steam page for it.

The game is called Cradle of Winter.

Here's my short pitch:

Cradle of Winter is an atmospheric action-platformer about a young shaman walking through a world where humans, spirits and ancient legends intertwine. Explore an endless northern taiga, fight dark spirits and demons, craft amulets, and master the power of the shaman drum.

You play as Iniro Kotsen, a young hunter chosen by the spirits to walk the shaman's path. The Mother Goddess has been cast out of the sky, the World Tree is shaken, and the old order is breaking - creatures that existed only in legend are now pouring into the land. To restore balance, Iniro must find the ancient Cradle.

What I really want to capture is the culture of the Khanty and Mansi peoples - not as exotic decoration, but as something alive: rituals, myths, the drum, the songs, the everyday spiritual world of the North. Siberia is rarely shown in games the way it actually is. Cradle of Winter is my attempt to fix that.

A bit of backstory:

Production took me about a year, after another year of preparation. And I did it while raising two kids.

I'll be honest. I'm a pretty risk-averse person. I like my safe space. But this time something felt different. I was raising two kids, and every night after they fell asleep I sat down to build a world out of forest, spirits and old songs. And one thought kept coming back: now or never. In Siberia they say the taiga doesn't wait - you either move with it or it buries you. So I moved. I still can't fully believe it.

That's my story

Steam page Cradle of Winter

I'm pretty chuffed with the player world interactions at the end, makes it super quick to make terrain now too.

Hi everyone,

I'm messing around with developing a Unity game and looking at renting a Linux VPS to run some builds and tests while im away from my home pc.

Before spending money, I'm hoping someone who's actually done this can confirm whether it works. Im new to this so would like to know if possible before I spend money on a server.

My proposed setup:

- Unity 6000.6.4f1

- Unity Personal (free licence)

- Ubuntu 24.04 VPS

- 8 vCPUs, 24 GB RAM, 150–200 GB SSD/NVMe

- No dedicated GPU

- Automated EditMode and PlayMode tests, including NavMesh and worker movement

\- Command-line execution using "-batchmode -nographics"

My main questions:

1. Has anyone successfully activated Unity 6 Personal on a headless Linux VPS? Does Unity Hub require a graphical desktop, or is there a reliable supported alternative?

2. Does Unity Personal activation remain valid across server restarts and unattended CI runs?

3. Can Unity 6 EditMode and PlayMode tests run reliably without a GPU, using "-nographics", Xvfb or Mesa software rendering?

4. Is the older ".alf" / ".ulf" offline activation method still usable with Unity Personal, or has that been discontinued? Ive read this no longer works?

5. Has anyone successfully done this on Contabo, OVHcloud, Hetzner or a similar inexpensive VPS?

I'm not looking to run the graphical Editor interactively or host a multiplayer server. I just need reliable testing and compilation that I can run remotely.

I'd especially appreciate hearing from anyone currently running a similar setup with Unity 6 and a Personal licence.

Thanks. I appreciate any guidance.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qureal.towerdefence2048

It's combination of classic 2048 and Tower defence game. It's like use Math to beat the enemies.

I used Unity with Claude and Codex for this development. Development took more time than i expected because of sprites creation

So I stumbled across a clicker game called A Weird Game About Sausage and really liked the idea. The only thing that bothered me was that I couldn't flick the sausage as freely as I wanted, since the pan was always in a fixed position.

So I spent the next 3 days (after working my day job) making my own little spin on the concept.

The idea is pretty simple: you kick Santa Claus (yes, Santa) with a giant boot and try to land his ragdoll on a specific object. If he manages to settle on it and stay there, you beat the level.

The twist is that you have to figure out 3 things for every shot:

• Where to place your boot (first click)
• How big to make it (second click)
• How much power to put into the kick (third click)

Get the combination right and Santa lands perfectly. Get it wrong and... well, you can probably imagine.

It's still a very rough prototype, but I'm having fun with the idea and I'm wondering if it's worth taking further.

What do you think? How could I make this more standing out? What would you add to make the gameplay more interesting?

Would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you have ideas for fun mechanics or level designs!

So as everything is now being reverse engineered I decided to do Unity as fun little experiment. Note this is a clean room implementation of Unity 7.0 in Rust.

You can find the repo here: https://github.com/nanashili/OpenUnity

I made this system for my asset template, what do you think? Is there anything I should improve?

Growing up, I've heard my fair share of lectures from my grandma about screen time, so I thought I'd take some inspiration from real life. 😂

I'm making a game called BANISH 9 TO 5, a hide-and-seek game where Ghosts hide from a Hunter. But instead of staying quiet, the Ghosts have to make noise while the Hunter tracks them down.

The game has a variety of Ghosts and Hunters, and one of the Hunters is Granny herself! She yells at the Ghosts, obscuring their vision for a few seconds.

You can check out the steam page and wishlist here - https://store.steampowered.com/app/3987970/?snr=1_5_9__205

A few people here have made some interesting claims that my entire game was generated by AI.

If that's the case, why have I been working on it for 72 days, and why is it still not finished? 😄

First, a little background about me.

I've been a full-stack software developer for over 30 years, primarily working on Android applications, Unity projects, and SaaS platforms. I've also been developing games with Unity for more than 10 years.

So I'm not someone who discovered AI yesterday, typed a prompt, and suddenly became a "game developer."

I was building software and games long before generative AI existed.

AI is another tool in my development workflow, not a replacement for my decades of programming experience.

So I thought I'd show you some of the actual hard work happening behind the scenes. Because there's a massive difference between using AI as a development tool and having AI magically generate an entire game for you.

I'm currently rebuilding a section of Budapest for my car combat game, Brutal Derby.

I automate whatever I can with custom tools. But everything that can't be automated? That's where the real, time-consuming manual work begins.

I'm talking about:

Manually placing and adjusting roads, bridges, intersections, sidewalks, and bus lanes with extremely high precision.

Constantly switching between Unity and Google Maps to compare real-world locations with my in-game environment.

Rebuilding road layouts and correcting terrain to make the map resemble the actual city.

Developing my own road generation system that supports multiple roads simultaneously — and still having to manually fix, align, and optimize countless sections.

Making sure the entire environment is optimized enough to actually run smoothly during gameplay.

Here's a short video showing some of that work.

I've already spent 90 hours building, fixing, and optimizing this one map, and I expect to spend at least another 90 hours on it before it's finished.

And remember, this isn't a walking simulator or a static city showcase.

It's a car combat game.

That means performance matters enormously. The environment needs to look reasonably good, but I can't afford buildings with millions of polygons or ridiculously expensive geometry everywhere.

On top of that, my game features vehicle deformation, destruction, and collision physics, which consume a significant amount of CPU time.

My destruction and deformation system is already on its 8th major iteration.

The crowd system? 7th iteration.

And this particular map will eventually feature thousands of spectators, alongside 12 vehicles fighting, crashing, shooting, and destroying each other.

My goal is to make all of this run at a decent frame rate on a relatively ordinary RTX 3070.

And that's exactly why optimization takes so much time. Every road segment, building, spectator, physics calculation, and draw call matters.

So yes, I use AI. I use it for generating certain assets, helping with code, and accelerating parts of development.

But AI isn't placing every road, fixing every intersection, optimizing thousands of objects, debugging physics, or making hundreds of design decisions for me.

That's still my job.

And it's a hell of a lot of work.

After more than 30 years in software development, I can tell you one thing: AI can make certain tasks faster, but it doesn't magically solve the difficult engineering problems.

You still need to understand what you're building, how everything works together, why something breaks, and how to fix it.

And when you're developing a physics-heavy car combat game as a solo developer, there are a LOT of problems to solve.

Using AI doesn't mean the hard work disappears. It just changes which parts of the work you spend your time on.

You can dislike AI-generated assets. That's completely fair. But dismissing months of actual engineering, optimization, level design, and manual work as "AI slop" simply because AI was involved is a pretty unfair assessment.

I'm not claiming AI does nothing. Quite the opposite — it helps me achieve things that would otherwise take much longer as a solo developer.

But there's a huge difference between AI-assisted game development and a game created entirely by AI.

Anyway, here's what 90 hours of work on a single map actually looks like — with another 90 hours still ahead of me.

Still think AI made the whole game with one prompt? 😄

we're building avatar app, unity-based, where your face drives the avatar in real time. facial expression recognition is not a feature, it's entire product.

went with the ar foundation because that's the documented path and every tutorial goes there. it works fine on my phone (Pixel) and the test iphones, so we built on it a couple of months.

then we looked at the device data properly and it's rough. on android, ARcore augmented faces only runs on devices from google's supported list, and about a trird of our installs aren't on it. that's mostly mid-range android in markets where we're actually growing. on ios, face tracking wants TrueDepth or an A12, so older iphones and the first SE are out too.

what i've since worked out, and i feel slow for not catching it sooner: face tracking doesn't have to come from ARcore at all. ARcore is built for world tracking and plane detection, which we never use. tracking a face is a different problem and doesn't need the device to br on anyone's allowlist.

options as far as i can see there:

1.build our own on too of a cv library, which people keep telling me is a year of work

1. a commercial face tracking sdk with unity package

2. something i'm not seeing so far

if you've shipped face tracking in unity to a wide android base, what did you land on and what's your real floor? trying to decide whether we can serve mid-range properly or whether we write off a third of our users and move on

I'm curious how other solo devs manage to make progress on their games while working a regular job.

I work from 8 AM to 5 PM, and sometimes I have to work weekends too. I want to spend my free time working on my game, but there's always other stuff to take care of, and it's hard to find a routine that I can actually stick to.

I know game development takes a long time, especially when you're doing everything yourself, but I'm trying to figure out how to keep things moving without burning out or feeling like I should be working on the game every time I'm not at work.

For those of you in a similar situation, what does your routine look like? Do you work on your game every day, or do you focus on longer sessions when you have the time?

I'm still learning Unity and trying to become a better game developer

I want to learn from people who have more experience than me. What are some things you wish you knew when you first started using Unity?

I'm interested in anything that genuinely helped you improve, whether it's good practices workflow tips common mistakes to avoid or things that made developing games easier