Untold Engine 0.17.0: Animation, Physics Events, Exporter Fixes, and New Tutorials

[untoldengine]

Untold Engine 0.17.0 is now available, bringing together improvements across animation, physics integration, Gaussian splat rendering, exporter reliability, and learning resources.

This release continues the engine’s focus on practical spatial visualization workflows: smoother runtime behavior, better support for large scenes, and clearer paths for developers learning or extending the engine.

Animation Improvements

This release cycle includes meaningful improvements to Untold Engine’s animation system.

Root motion extraction and application make it easier for character movement to come from authored animation data instead of being driven separately in code. This helps animated characters feel more grounded, especially when movement, physics, and gameplay logic need to work together.

Animation transitions have also improved with inertialized transitions in changeAnimation. When switching from one clip to another, the engine can now smooth the pose change instead of snapping abruptly. This makes common transitions, such as idle to run or run back to idle, feel more natural without requiring complex blend trees.

Under the hood, compiled animation clip sampling and the pose layer foundation make runtime animation playback more efficient and better structured for future work. Per-entity animation policies also give developers control over whether animation is inherited, forced on, or forced off for specific entities.

Physics Backend Events

Physics backend events can now be delivered to subscribers and USC scripts.

This gives engine users a cleaner way to react to physics activity from gameplay code, tooling, or script-driven behavior. It also strengthens the connection between Untold Engine’s native systems and the USC scripting layer, making scripted interactions more useful for runtime behavior, simulation feedback, and custom logic.

Gaussian Splat Improvements

A major focus of this release is making Gaussian splat scenes more scalable and responsive.

Untold Engine now supports progressive loading for splats, allowing large Gaussian datasets to appear in stages instead of waiting for everything to load at once. Progressive Gaussian loading is also now tile-independent, giving the engine more flexibility when streaming and displaying splat data.

The release adds overdraw-aware Gaussian LOD selection, spatial bucketing for progressive Gaussian tier generation, and new LOD debugging tools for splats. These changes help balance visual quality and performance while making large Gaussian scenes easier to inspect and tune.

This release also includes a new Gaussian system API, quantized spherical harmonics support, uniform covariance scaling fixes, and fixes for a Gaussian LOD memory leak and stale-task race.

Note, Gaussian Splat feature in the engine is a WIP.

Exporter Fixes

Release 0.17.0 includes a fix for the tile-streamer texture exporter.

This improves reliability in the asset pipeline, especially for projects that depend on tiled scene exports and streamed content. Since Untold Engine is designed for large spatial scenes, keeping the exporter dependable is just as important as improving runtime performance.

Tutorials and Documentation

This release also includes a major documentation push.

New and updated tutorials have been added for the demos, along with additional architecture documentation. The README has been refreshed with GIFs and updated demo links, making it easier for new users to understand what the engine can do and where to start.

These docs are especially useful for developers exploring the demo projects, learning the engine architecture, or evaluating Untold Engine for XR, 3D, and spatial visualization work.

Closing

Untold Engine 0.17.0 brings smoother animation workflows, better physics event delivery, more scalable Gaussian splat rendering, a more reliable exporter path, and stronger learning materials.

Thanks to everyone following the project, testing the demos, reading the docs, and sharing feedback. Each release helps shape Untold Engine into a more practical and capable Swift/Metal engine for Apple-platform spatial apps.