XR Daily: ArtStation Blocks AI Crawlers

ArtStation Makes NoAI the Default and Moves to Block AI Crawlers

ArtStation has flipped its stance on AI training protection. The platform now enables its NoAI tag by default for every new upload and is retroactively applying it to existing projects and profiles, so artists no longer have to manually flag their older portfolio work. The shift is significant: protection is now the default, and artists who want to permit AI training on their work have to opt out rather than opt in.

ArtStation is also working with Cloudflare to identify and block known AI crawlers and automated scraping tools before they can pull content at scale. The company is upfront that no measure can make public artwork impossible to scrape, but frames this as making unauthorized access meaningfully harder. Its updated Terms of Service now state that artists retain ownership of their work, that ArtStation will not sell or license it to AI companies, and that the platform has no agreements permitting anyone to scrape its content. Normal search engines still get through, so portfolios stay discoverable by recruiters and studios.

The announcement goes beyond training data. ArtStation admitted its CreatedWithAI label and filters have not kept generated images from overwhelming discovery, and says it is building improved tools to keep professional work from being buried. It is not banning AI art outright, but the default-to-protect move is a real change. It lands shortly after ArtStation and Sketchfab were acquired by KitBash in August.

→ 80 Level

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Capcom Details the Real-Time Sword Combat Behind Onimusha: Way of the Sword

Onimusha: Way of the Sword, the first new mainline entry in roughly two decades, releases today on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch 2, and Capcom has opened up about how it rebuilt the series’ combat on RE Engine. Director Satoru Nihei says full production only kicked off around 2020, once the engine had matured through years of Resident Evil and Monster Hunter work.

The technical highlight is how sword clashes are computed. Enemy attack types, weapon vectors, and even terrain slopes factor into the clash logic in real time, and a new Dynamic Dismemberment System decides exactly where Musashi’s blade cuts through an enemy or environmental object. Capcom kept the identity-defining systems: Issen counterattacks, Soul Absorption, the Oni Gauntlet, and the Genma, while layering new parries, deflections, and a guard-break Issen on top. The stated bar for every decision was whether it preserved the tension and exhilaration of the original.

The art pipeline is a who’s who of current tools: Maya, ZBrush, Substance 3D, MotionBuilder, SpeedTree, Quixel Megascans, ray-traced reflections, and a lighting system tuned to balance Japan’s humid, overcast atmosphere against the visibility a responsive action game needs. Art Director Hiroyuki Nara oversaw research into Kyoto’s historic temples and folklore for the Edo-period setting.

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A 1993 Amiga Game Ported to Godot, With an LLM Reading the 68000 Assembly

Rabah Shihab built Babylonian Twins in 1993 on an Amiga 500 in Baghdad, under sanctions, with no internet and electricity only a few hours a day. The entire game is pure 68000 assembly, 72,758 lines of it, written against the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual. It was the first commercial game made in Iraq, and for years almost nobody played it.

Three decades later Shihab handed that assembly to an LLM, running inside Claude Code with a terminal and filesystem, and asked it to port the game to Godot 4 at the Amiga’s original 50 Hz. The model worked in three stages: migrating the 2010 C++ iOS engine into Godot, rebuilding the original 68000 assembly, then nesting the 1993 original inside the modern game as a second launchable title. Along the way it assembled the Amiga binaries with vasm, booted them in FS-UAE, and diffed the output to verify correctness.

What makes the story worth reading is the honesty. Shihab admits the AI’s work “went faster than I could follow,” and that some of it was wrong in ways he did not notice for weeks. It is a well-documented case study of using a model to reverse-engineer and port code far outside its training data, not a hype post.

→ Babylonian Twins

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The Unity Cube Is Now the First Published Quest Game at 207Hz

The Unity Cube is exactly what it sounds like: a blank Unity environment with a single grey cube you cannot even interact with. Developer Tony “SkarredGhost” Vitillo built it to test whether Meta would let literally anything into App Lab, and it proved the point. It is arguably the worst game on the Horizon Store, and it is now the first published Quest game to run at 207Hz.

The update arrives on the back of Quest 3’s newly unlocked 207Hz refresh rate (up to 240Hz with developer access), available on Horizon OS 2.7. Rendering just one asset makes hitting that target trivial in a way no real game can match, since standalone headsets lack the headroom to sustain those framerates with actual content. Vitillo’s description of the experience is the interesting part: the jump makes the virtual world feel “more reactive,” and going back to 72Hz makes VR feel like it is “scattering.”

→ Road to VR

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WebGPU Is Quietly Becoming a Real Compute Platform for LLMs

Two in-browser LLM inference projects surfaced on Hacker News this week, and both run on WebGPU. WebLLM, MLC’s high-performance in-browser inference engine, pulled 143 points, while Three-LLM, a newer Three.js-based WebGPU inference engine, joined it further down the list.

The through-line matters for anyone in real-time graphics: the same WebGPU API that pushes pixels is now being used for serious GPU compute in the browser, with no server required. Models run locally on whatever GPU the page can access, pointing toward a browser that is a legitimate deployment target for AI features. WebLLM has been around for a while, but the recurring traction, plus projects like Three-LLM wrapping inference in a familiar rendering stack, suggests the tooling is crossing from demo territory into something developers can build on.

→ WebLLM · Three-LLM

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Frictional Games Shows Extended ONTOS Gameplay

Frictional Games, the studio behind SOMA and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, has released an extended gameplay look at ONTOS, its new sci-fi horror game. You play as Aditi Amani exploring Samsara, a repurposed moon hotel where each room carries clues about what is happening, and the footage leans creepier and gorier than SOMA while keeping its investigative DNA.

Creative Director Thomas Grip described a system built around experimentation: you test theories, make mistakes, and observe the consequences before facing the main experiment, with each experiment having different endings that invite replay. ONTOS is slated for 2027 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

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Quick Bites

• Project Hail Mary: Journey Among the Stars gets a first extended gameplay trailer. Maze Theory’s mixed reality game, made with author Andy Weir, puts you in Ryland Grace’s role alongside Rocky and launches on Quest, Pico, and Android XR this fall. → UploadVR
• A new UE5 tool deforms any static mesh at runtime, no baked vertex animation required. → 80 Level
• Agents 404 broke down how its devs shipped a prototype and earned 120K Steam wishlists in two months. → 80 Level
• Galápagos: The Last Eden is an interactive wildlife experience coming to Android XR. → UploadVR