Epic confirms AI is helping build Unreal Engine as a Roblox AI bot scrapes Open3DLab

Thursday, October 29, was a quieter day for AI in games, with four stories instead of the usual five or six. But they share a theme. AI is moving out of the experimental corner of game development and into the middle of how games and engines get made. And the arguments are increasingly about the details: whose data gets used, who pays for the tools, and who sets the rules.

Epic Games explained how it uses AI to build Unreal Engine itself. Roblox confirmed that an AI agent it built downloaded a large collection of 3D models, adult content included, from a site that never agreed to it. EA staff say the company encourages AI tools while quietly capping how much they can use them. And Meta is testing a small AI pet app in the Philippines.

Here's what happened, in plain English.

Epic says AI is helping write Unreal Engine

A game engine is the software studios build their games on. Unreal Engine, made by Epic Games, is one of the most widely used, and it powers Epic's own Fortnite. Yesterday's news was that Epic plans to let people train AI on what they make with Unreal. Today we learned more about how Epic uses AI on the engine itself.

Marcus Wassmer, Epic's executive vice president of development, answered questions from the site This Week in Video Games, and Game Developer picked up the story. His statement was direct: "we are definitely using AI to develop code and features for Unreal Engine."

According to Wassmer, most of that work is happening in the development streams tied to three products: Fortnite; UEFN, Unreal Editor for Fortnite, which players and studios use to build their own Fortnite islands; and Unreal Engine 6, the next major version of the engine. Game Developer adds that a relatively modest Unreal Engine 5.9 update is possible, and that it would include changes developed with AI.

The most concrete example he gave was a bug fix. Wassmer said AI coding tools such as Claude and Codex have eliminated what he called "non-deterministic cooking bugs," problems Epic had been trying to stamp out for about a decade. Two terms need unpacking there. In Unreal, "cooking" is the step that converts a game's content into the form that actually runs on a particular console or PC. A "non-deterministic" bug is one that appears only some of the time, even when you do the same thing twice, which makes it notoriously hard to track down. Wassmer said the tools are helping Epic "keep the engine more stable as we work."

He also described a less glamorous use: AI helps monitor how stable Fortnite is on PC, flagging which combinations of graphics drivers and hardware are causing problems.

Who writes the code, and why Epic isn't slowing down

So who is actually writing Unreal's code now? According to Game Developer's report, Wassmer said Epic's engineers are no longer writing the bulk of it themselves, but that they control the scope of how AI is used, which is to say they still decide what gets built.

That fits with something Epic said recently: that it rebuilt the Epic Games Launcher with "vibe coding," and that the new version runs faster. Vibe coding means describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI write the actual code.

Epic knows plenty of players and developers are skeptical of AI. Wassmer addressed that head on: "We are more concerned about the risks of moving too slowly than we are about AI skepticism." He also predicted that "in pretty short order doing AI development for basically all software will be ubiquitous." Game Developer says he sees quality as the best answer to critics, meaning the work itself will have to make the case.

Epic is also inviting outside developers to work the same way. From November 12 to 15 it is running a four-day game jam in which teams of one to five people build a game in Unreal Engine or in UEFN. According to Shacknews, entrants are encouraged to use any AI tools, including coding agents and asset generation, though AI isn't required.

Taken together, the message from Epic this week is consistent. AI is no longer a side project there. It is part of how the engine that so many studios build on is being made.

Roblox shuts down an AI agent that scraped Open3DLab

The second story is messier. Open3DLab is a website where artists share 3D models and art, and it runs sister sites that host adult content. Its administrator, who goes by "Salaryman," published a post saying a web crawler, a bot that automatically downloads pages, had mass-downloaded material from the sites.

According to Open3DLab, the crawler took 145.5 GB of art assets and 3D models, including 117.4 GB of adult content: 1,027 files from 712 projects. Salaryman says it ignored the sites' terms of service, many creators' non-commercial licenses, and the sites' robots.txt file. That's a small text file websites use to tell automated bots what they are and aren't allowed to collect.

Open3DLab says it spotted the crawler on October 18, blocked it, and emailed whoever was behind it. On October 19 the bot was back. Salaryman says the crawler traced back to a Roblox researcher who co-authored the paper behind Cube, Roblox's own generative AI system for making 3D objects.

Roblox has now confirmed the core of it. In a statement to Game Developer, a spokesperson said an AI agent the company built had "mistakenly" been scraping the content and was "failing to operate as intended." An AI agent here means an AI program set up to carry out tasks on its own, in this case collecting data. The company's position, in its own words: "The agent was decommissioned, and the data was not used for any purpose, including training any AI models." Roblox added that it is "strengthening safeguards for how agents like this are built and reviewed."

Why does this matter beyond one website? A lot of Roblox's players are children, and the company is already facing lawsuits over child safety. Game Developer notes that using adult assets would violate Roblox's own terms of service. Salaryman's concern is about what could happen if material like this ever ended up in a training set. "Models reproduce what they learn from," he wrote. He also stressed that Open3DLab has no problem with adult content as such; the objection is to it being taken without consent for a company's training data.

Roblox says that didn't happen, and nothing in the reporting shows the data was used. But the episode is a clear example of a wider issue in AI: the bots that gather training data are often built quickly, and the people whose work they collect usually find out only after the fact.

EA encourages AI, and then caps it

Earlier this week, current and former EA employees told the games industry site Vertical Slice that generative AI, the kind that makes text, code and images, was being pushed heavily inside the company. Vertical Slice now has a follow-up that adds a twist.

Staff at the publisher of Battlefield and EA Sports FC say they are encouraged to use AI tools, including Anthropic's Claude, which some say is being pushed on engineers in particular. There is no formal mandate. But there is a budget. "There's a budgetary cap on generative AI usage but it's opaque," one current employee said. "They cut off your access for the remainder of the month if you exceed it." Another said a colleague was told to stop after going past a $100 monthly limit.

For a sense of scale, Vertical Slice points to Anthropic's own published figures, which put the average Claude Code cost for enterprise users at around $150 to $250 per developer per month. Those are Anthropic's own numbers, but they suggest a $100 limit is below what the company itself describes as typical use.

That's where staff see a contradiction. One employee said EA describes itself as an "AI-first" company, and managers call AI "the future," yet usage is closely watched. As another put it: "If you want us to use the technology, then why are you limiting us?" Vertical Slice also notes that EA has said AI is meant to augment its staff, not replace them.

Views on the tools themselves are mixed. "On one level it has accelerated some of my work," one source said, while adding that you need real subject matter expertise for the output to be useful. Another said they are opposed to generative AI on ethical grounds but "don't dare refuse to use it."

All of this comes after EA's recent round of about 400 job cuts and the closure of BioWare. Vertical Slice says it has repeatedly asked EA about its generative AI policies and its handling of the layoffs, and has not received a response.

Meta tests Waddle World, an AI pet that keeps a diary

The last story is lighter. Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has quietly launched an app called Waddle World. TechCrunch reports that it is available only in the Philippines for now, on iOS and Android, and that it was spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra, who summed it up as "Tamagotchi meets ChatGPT." A Tamagotchi is the small digital pet from the 1990s that you had to feed and look after.

In Waddle World, you hatch a pixel-art pet, feed it and play short mini-games with it. The AI part is a journal. You tell your pet about your day, by voice or by typing, and it writes a diary entry in its own voice, with a doodle. It can also send a weekly email based on what it has learned about you.

Meta's app page is unusually clear about what the app is not: "Not a chatbot. Not an assistant. Not a productivity tool." It also says the app isn't meant to build habits, and it is marked as suitable for people over 18. TechCrunch suggests Meta may be steering away from companion-style chatbots because rivals such as Character.AI and OpenAI face lawsuits alleging their products harmed teenagers.

TechCrunch also suggests Waddle World could be a test, or a possible precursor, for a Tamagotchi-style gadget Meta is developing under its Muse brand. Meta hasn't commented on whether the app will reach other countries. It sits alongside Meta's other recent AI app experiments, including Pocket, for making small games with prompts, and Vibes, for AI video.

The big picture

None of today's stories is a blockbuster launch, but together they show where things stand. At Epic, AI isn't a debate anymore; it is how the engine is being built, and the company says the bigger risk is moving too slowly. At Roblox, the question is data: what AI systems collect, from whom, and whether anyone checks before it happens. At EA, the question is money and pressure: staff are told AI is the future while working under a budget they can't see. And at Meta, the question is what an AI product for players should be, with a pet that listens and writes rather than a chatbot that talks back.

The rules for AI in games are still being written, and today they were written in code commits, robots.txt files, monthly budgets and app store listings. That's less dramatic than a big launch, but it's where the real decisions are being made.