Wait, how did Lego beat Minecraft to making a city builder?

Lego announced a city builder called Lego Skylines last month and we all collectively said: "Oh yeah, duh." A landscape of colorful bricks snapping together into a metropolis from the godlike perspective we already view our real life Legos just makes sense.

Hold on, what about the brand I affectionately refer to as "digital Legos"? Minecraft should by rights have spawned a city building spinoff by now. How were Lego and Mojang not competing over this category of PC players years ago? trojkonferencja2024.pl

Minecraft as a city builder:

NachrichtenThe shortlist for 2026's Golden Joystick Awards is out, including PC Game of the Year, and you can vote nowYou've got until October 23.Öffnen →

As someone who spent a lot of their childhood talking to trees, I'm of the opinion that videogame forestry doesn't need to look any better than Alan Wake 2's Pacific Northwest woodlands. That hasn't stopped AMD from innovating though; by leveraging 'tetrahedral cages' to help render a vast scene of greenery, researchers at the company say they've managed to cut the potential ray tracing memory usage by 98%.

Typically, a scene of around 25,000 independently animated plants made of hundreds of thousands of triangles could hoover up 80 GB of GPU memory. Not only that, but it would take a Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU 300 ms per frame to check which surfaces within a scene are intersecting with a ray (the data structure that organises this information is called a Bounding Volume Hierarchy). In short, using traditional tech to render such a densely populated scene would be slow and choppy.

Holger Gruen, a Fellow of AMD's Advanced Graphics Program, recently shared on GPUOpen that the team's tetrahedral cage demos only use "1.7 GB of BVH memory and approximately 3.3 ms for all BVH updates per frame" in comparison. Touch grass? Not when we've got trees like these.

Anyway, let me break down how this tech works: a tetrahedral cage essentially wraps around the dense mesh of all that plant matter. Rather than many polygonal leaves bobbing in the simulated breeze, only the simplified cage deforms instead. So, rather than looking straight at the many wibbly-wobbly vertices of a virtual tree, rays are instead traced along the simplified surface structure of the tetrahedral cage around it.

At the risk of really oversimplifying, I think of this tech a bit like those 3D models or laser-engravings you sometimes see inside cubes of crystal—but maybe that's just me.

"The dense geometry of an animated object and its BVH structures remain static and reusable. During runtime, only the cage deforms. Rays are transformed back into a static reference frame before intersecting them with the dense set of triangles," Gruen explains. "This means animation cost only scales with cage complexity, not with triangle count. This comes at the expense of losing animation control over every vertex, but this is fine for many animations."

In other words, for a scene where the focus is less on the luscious fronds of a single plant and more on a field of foliage, devs likely won't miss the ability to finetune individual animations. But for 3D trees with personality, tetrahedral cages won't be as useful.

It's also important to note that the tech is still a research demonstration, rather than a fully fledged feature coming to a game near you soon. That said, the team is already "hard at work" on making "DXR samples and a header-only C++ library that allows building high-quality tetrahedral cages for skinned objects, keyframe-animated objects, and static objects." You can also read more about the team's research in the open access paper 'Ray Tracing Massive Amounts of Animated Geometry'.

After ending development and laying off most of the Destiny 2 team, Bungie says Destiny still has a future, and it starts with undoing the game's biggest mistake.

In a new video and blog post explaining "the next chapter for Bungie," studio head Poria Torkan joins product head and Marathon GM Josh Deane to address an understandably worried fan base.

"We are not done with Destiny," the post reads, calling the now-calcified MMO "foundational to our future."

"We want to return Destiny to its original promise, to recapture the qualities that have always made it special," the post continues. "The awe-inspiring mystery, meaningful discovery, and a community of Guardians coming together against impossible odds. That begins with restoring important parts of Destiny 2's history that players can no longer experience today."

Deane expands on this point in the video, calling the vaulted content, including paid content that was removed from the game for opaque technical reasons, "what's rightfully yours."

"It's going to take some time. I wish we could just flip a freakin' switch," he says. "But we're going to commit to unvaulting the Destiny 2 campaigns, the destinations, the raids that never should have been ripped away to begin with."

Unvaulted content will be brought up to "the stability and gameplay standards of Destiny 2 today," Bungie says, from lighting to combatant AI.

Bungie owns up to the massive misstep of the DCV in its blog post: "We cannot change the decision we made, but we can acknowledge its impact and do the work to make it right by restoring these important parts of Destiny's history."

"That restoration will hopefully lay the foundation for how we reforge into new Destiny stories and games that you all deserve and that we want to create," Deane adds.

This is reiterated in the blog post: "We have to find a way back to making games that we want to play, but with you at the center." Bungie says it wants to "build a stronger long-term future for Destiny," offering a glimmer of hope for fans mourning the series.

Bungie shuts down leak claiming Destiny will be revived through a merger with Marathon.