MCP drops sessions, GodotHub gives Godot a launcher, Houdini 22 adds Gaussian splats

The protocol that lets AI agents talk to game engines shipped a major rewrite this week, a community project gave Godot the multi-version launcher it has never had, and Reallusion cut the price of its webcam face capture. We are also catching up on a few July releases, led by Houdini 22.

MCP drops sessions, which makes engine servers easier to host

MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the standard that lets an AI assistant like Claude Code or Cursor use outside tools, which is how agents can now open a Unity project or set up a Convai character for you. Its 2026-07-28 specification went final this week, and the core is now stateless: the session handshake is gone, so every request stands alone and can land on any server instance. Method and tool names now travel in HTTP headers, so gateways can route without reading the request body, and a new pattern called Multi Round-Trip Requests lets a tool pause and ask the user something mid-call, like a confirmation or a missing setting. The spec also formalizes extensions (MCP Apps and Tasks) and adds a deprecation policy with a 12 month minimum window. The TypeScript, Python, Go and C# SDKs were updated on release day.

This change happens behind the scenes. Nothing changes in your engine until each MCP server and client adopts the new version, and existing servers have real migration work ahead. The payoff later is simpler, cheaper hosting for the engine and tool servers that small teams are starting to lean on.

Godot gets the launcher it never shipped

GodotHub is a free, MIT licensed launcher that does for Godot roughly what Unity Hub does for Unity: install several engine versions side by side (stable, beta or your own custom builds), organize and launch projects, and start new ones from templates, with Git built into the same window. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. It hit 1.0 on July 23 and version 1.1 followed on July 27.

The caution is maturity. This is one independent developer's project, not an official Godot Foundation tool, and it is barely a week past 1.0, so expect frequent changes. Still, if you keep a shipped game on one Godot 4 version while prototyping on another, it solves a daily annoyance that Godot has never solved itself.

Houdini 22 brings Gaussian splats and terrain to Copernicus

SideFX released Houdini 22 on July 16. The headline is a full Gaussian splat toolset. Gaussian splats are 3D captures made from photos, built from millions of soft, colored points instead of polygons, and they are a fast way to turn real places into 3D. Houdini can now train them from photos or generate them from scenes, then animate, relight and render them in Karma, its renderer. Copernicus, Houdini's GPU image system, becomes a world-building tool with heightfield terrain, ocean surfaces and what SideFX calls game-ready animated maps, plus grunge nodes and experimental 3D texture painting. KineFX, Houdini's rigging toolset, gets reusable rig templates, Set Driven Keys and ragdoll improvements.

Houdini still has a steep learning curve, and it is not where most first-time devs should start. Houdini Indie, the lower-cost commercial option, is now rental only, and the free Apprentice edition remains available for learning.

AccuFace 2 makes webcam face capture cheaper

Reallusion launched AccuFace 2, its AI facial motion capture plugin for iClone. It works from an ordinary webcam or a recorded video, and Reallusion says the new model tracks better in low light and with small faces, with expression curves for finer control. It now runs on AMD GPUs as well as NVIDIA, and it costs $299, $200 less than the first version. It is a paid add-on that needs iClone 8.74 or later on Windows, so it only makes sense if you already animate in iClone, but for that group it is one of the cheaper routes to usable facial animation.

Also worth your time

• PixelAOI 0.5 can now generate sprites, tiles and animation sheets locally on your own GPU through ComfyUI (a free app for running AI image models on your own machine), with your own models and no credits. You need a capable GPU and a working ComfyUI setup. The editor is Windows only; the developer says it is free for six months, then a one-time $17.
• Autodesk's Maya 2027.2 lets you train MotionMaker on your own animation. MotionMaker is Maya's AI motion generator, and training it on your own data means generated walk and run cycles keep a character's personality. It is relevant to small teams through Maya Indie ($330 a year under $100K revenue), and it needs a fair amount of your own clean animation data to be useful.
• Abstract's July update to InstaMAT adds painting directly on UV maps in a 2D viewport, plus faster baking and new procedural nodes. The bigger news for small teams is the license: Abstract says its Pioneer tier is free, with no feature limits, for individuals and businesses under $100K a year in revenue, with attribution when you share work. Expect a learning curve if node-based materials are new to you.
• Pilgway released 3DCoat 2026 with a GPU node-based texturing system that Pilgway says lets you preview materials while you are still sculpting, before retopology (rebuilding a mesh with clean geometry) or UVs. 3DCoat keeps sculpting, retopology, UVs and texturing in one app on a perpetual license, EUR 379 before VAT for an individual.
• Sisir is a new free hair grooming tool for Windows from an independent game developer, in beta: draw guides on a character, style procedurally and preview with a GPU renderer. The limitation for games is big for now: it exports strand hair only through Alembic (a 3D interchange format), and the hair cards real-time engines need are planned but not there yet.

Reply and tell us what you are building this week.