Lars Thießen

Bio Time! I work as a gameplay programmer, specializing in Unreal Engine 5. Sometimes I give lectures about game development and even worked as a game development professor for a while. When I have too much free time, I also write about game programming on my blog: larstofus.com

In case you haven't drunk the vibe coding cool-aid yet and still prefer to create games yourself, this #Unreal tutorial on how to add your own primitive coloration view modes to the Unreal editor may be interesting to you: haukethiessen.com/visualizing-... #gamedev

Are you an Epic Games employee with thoughts on the company's pivot towards GenAI and how it's handling that messaging? I would be extremely interested in hearing them. Happy to chat confidentially. Email: chris.kerr@verticalslice.news Signal: kerrblimey.43

If I were a tech company I wouldn't start my blog posts with "Programming is too hard for me, so I stopped doing it" store.epicgames.com/news/epic-ga... #ue5 #gamedev

A new day, a new blog post on how to speed up the launch of the Unreal Editor! larstofus.com/2026/10/11/s... The described change by me speeds up shader hashing by an factor of 8, and is already confirmed to go into the main branch! 🥳 #ue5 #gamedev

I commented under a pull request today giving tips to get it merged. Now, after looking through the github account I think the pull request as well as it's description might have been ai-generated. Now I have this weird sense of betrayal, like I was cheated out of a social interaction 😑

Windows forgot how time works... (Also, a good reminder to not hardcode adjustable settings into description texts) #windows

The moment if you get a compile error in a templated function which is only declared from inside a macro and called from a different, triple nested macro... At least I think that's what happening, Intellisense already gave up three layers before the error 😿

That's something: Artstation finally decided to fight against the Ai flood But in practice those actions amount to just enabling the "please-don't-scrape-us" checkbox by default and block known ai scrapers. Really hoping that this is just a first step 🤞 magazine.artstation.com/2026/09/ai-u...

After speeding up the Unreal Editor launch by not by not spawning 38000 tooltips and not opening 5500 files let's get ready for the conclusion of my trilogy: Speeding up the Unreal Editor launch by not loading 1585 files (source code included) larstofus.com/2026/08/16/s... #gamedev #ue5

New #gamedev blog post: haukethiessen.com/taking-contr... This time, I'm adding a new option to the mesh build settings in #Unreal, making it possible to adjust the Lumen mesh card generation in more detail. Had some fun getting this to work, and depending on your project, it can be quite useful.

mods are asleep, i can post hog on main corsair cove releases tomorrow btw

A "no-Ai-whatsoever" stance would have been even better in my opinion, but still: A win is a win! Maybe I should give Godot another try? 👀

If you follow my blog you might have noticed that I'm quite a fan of Superluminal, a fantastic CPU profiler that *just works*. (yes, really). So far it was Windows exclusive, but this finally changes 🥳 Do yourself a favor and try it out!

Helping out our brothers and sisters in the Quake mapping scene! NextBroom, the non-generative-AI fork of Trenchbroom, is welcoming contributors to lend a helping hand! Head on over to codeberg.org/NextBroomTea... to check it out!

#UE6 introduces Verse, a programming language that can distribute large-scale computations over hundreds of servers and thousands of CPUs automatically, in real-time. Which is proably Epic's best shot at making their launcher run smoothly 💀

"The power of UE6 brings Fortnite skins into YOUR GAME!!" Hot take, but maybe they should stay in the game they were specifically designed for? 🫠 #ue6

How many files do you expect a program to read from disk to fill a drop down menu with 14 entries? A) 0 A) 1 B) 14 C) > 1.5k Bonus question: What do you guess is Unreal's answer to this question? 🫠

The Steam Next Fest is upon us! If you haven't already, check out the Corsair Cove demo and drop us a review! People really seem to like it so far (>90% positive reviews right now)🏴‍☠️ store.steampowered.com/app/3858730/...

The demo for Corsair Cove, the most recent game I worked on went live a few days ago and so far the feedback has been amazing. If you haven't yet I really recommend trying out the demo 🥳

Do you remember my collection of fixes for Unreal's renaming issues? The first of them got merged and will be shipped with 5.8! (Actually, it got merged a while ago, but I just noticed it now) #ue5 #gamedv larstofus.com/2026/04/26/h...

The performance of Unreal's message log isn't great, especially if you log a lot of messages. Luckily, it's easy to fix and to make it a looot faster: larstofus.com/2026/05/28/h... #ue5 #gamedev

UPDATE: It's there! The 4th edition just dropped! Stay calm, everybody! 🥳

Sometimes, when I set up worst-case scenarios during profiling, I feel sorry for Unreal. This frametime graph looks like a murder scene🔪🩸

Wait, wasn't UE6 the version supposed to bring all this (meta)verse stuff? Can't say I'm too excited for that 🫠

We've been working on replacing the Asset Library with something built for the present and future. Here's what's coming. #godotengine godotengine.org/article/intr...

New blog article📝: haukethiessen.com/better-rough... This time about composite textures in #Unreal: What they are, why you should use them, and most importantly, how to automate them, using a plugin that I wrote recently. #opensource #gamedev

Why optimization matters: When signing into Windows takes too long, Windows can activate the screen lock, and, by doing that, sign you out again before the initial sign-in is even finished! I now always have to move the mouse while looking at the login screen, just so I can reach the desktop 🫠

For those not happy with the new "Home" tab from Unreal Engine 5.7.3, to remove the tab: == Edit: Engine\Config\BaseEngine.ini Section: [SystemSettings] Add line: HomeScreen.EnableHomeScreen=False ==

Never seen a game warn players of it's own chosen engine in the system requirements before, but there's a first for everything, I guess. #UE5

Unreal has a surprisingly high number of issues when it comes to renaming things in the editor. It even refuses some renaming actions altogether! Let's investigate and fix this: larstofus.com/2026/04/26/h... #gamedev #UE5 #UnrealEngine

Hey, I worked on that! 😍 Really glad to finally see it out in the open, a lot of hard work went into it!

Did some local changes in my local Unreal version to launch the UMG editor 3x as fast... But I'm not sure if it's worth it to clean up the code and triple-check potential issues to a degree that I can open a pull request. I already have 10 open ones just idling in the queue for ages 😖

meshoptimizer 1.1 is out! github.com/zeux/meshopt... Featuring two new major features, meshlet topology compression and opacity micromaps, as well as a few smaller features and improvements! More information in the infographic and release above :) Boosts and repository stars are welcome!

Whoop! 🥳 The first of the two described fixes just got merged and will be part of 5.8!