Category: Game Development

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Flax Engine Released

The Flax Engine game engine has just seen it’s 1.0 release. We’ve had our eyes on this engine since it’s first public beta in 2018, which was then followed by a few years of radio silence. The in July of 2020 we got the 0.7 release which added several new features including C++ live scripting support. With today’s release the Flax Engine is now available to everyone.

Key features include:

  • Seamless C# and C++ scripting
  • Automatic draw calls batching and instancing
  • Every asset is using async content streaming by default
  • Cross-platform support (Windows, Linux, Android, PS4. Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, UWP…)
  • GPU Lightmaps Baking
  • Visual Scripting
  • VFX tools
  • Nested prefabs
  • Gameplay Globals for technical artists
  • Open World Tools (terrain, foliage, fog, levels streaming)
  • Hot-reloading C#/C++ in Editor
  • Full source-code available
  • Direct communication and help from engine devs
  • Lightweight development (full repo clone + compilation in less than 3 min)

Flax is available for Windows and Linux developers with the source code available on GitHub. Flax is a commercial game engine, but under fairly liberal terms. Commercial license terms are:

Use Flax for free, pay 4% when you release (above first $25k per quarter). Flax Engine and all related tools, all features, all supported platforms, all source code, all complete projects and Flax Samples with regular updates can be used for free.

If you want to learn more about Flax Engine, be sure to check out the following links:

You can learn more about the game engine and see it in action in the video below. Stay tuned for a more in-depth technical video on Flax Engine in the future.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Amazon AWS Join Blender As Corporate Sponsor

Following quickly on the heels of last months Facebook Sponsorship of Blender, today it was announced Blender has a new corporate sponsor, Amazon AWS. This sponsorship is a bit different, in that it is aimed at improving a very specific aspect of Blender, character animation. The sponsorship will enable Blender to hire multiple developers to work over a period of 3 years on improving character animation tools in Blender.

Details of the announcement from the Blender news:

Today Blender Foundation announced that AWS has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member to support continued core development and innovation for Blender. AWS committed to a period of three years, specifically to support character animation tools development.

“We’re excited to continue to expand our support for open source solutions for our customers in the digital content creation space.” said Kyle Roche, GM of Creative Tools. “The Blender Foundation has been an industry leader in providing production-grade open source software solutions, and we look forward to helping our mutual customers work more efficiently than ever before through continued improvements in Blender.”

Two years ago, Blender Foundation started a project to redesign and upgrade Blender’s character animation system for the coming decade. Nicknamed “Animation 2020” it has a number of specs that were reviewed by character animator and industry veteran Jason Schleifer, now Creative Director at AWS.

“It has always been my preference to work closely with industry talents on improving Blender,” said Blender chairman Ton Roosendaal. “Thanks to AWS’ support we can recruit additional top developers to help us bring character animation in Blender to new heights.”

Blender Foundation will start recruiting in the course of Q1 2021, pending the current travel and meeting restrictions being lifted or relaxed.

Amazon AWS, or Amazon Web Services is the massive cloud services portion of Amazon, which provides a great deal of the backbone of the modern internet. They also have gaming divisions including owning Twitch, as well as the recently updated Lumberyard game engine. Blender is an open source cross platform 3D application that supports modelling, animation, texturing, rendering, sculpting and more. Improvements to the character animation tools will be a welcome addition. Blender development is supported by the Blender Development Fund.

You can learn more about the Amazon AWS sponsorship in the video below.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Unity and Snap Inc Announce New Partnership

Unity Technologies and Snap Inc (parent company of SnapChat) have announced a new partnership. The partnership is a two-fold endeavour, advertising and technology integration.

Details of the advertising partnership from Business Wire:

Starting today, Unity Ads, which reaches a highly engaged mobile gaming audience on both Android and iOS, is now included in the Snap Audience Network (SAN). Snapchat’s SAN advertiser campaigns will now include video inventory from Unity’s extensive network of mobile gaming titles, helping advertisers extend beyond Snapchat. Unity Ads1 reports 22.9B+ monthly global ad impressions, reaching 2B+ monthly active end-users worldwide. In 2020, mobile ad viewers have converted at higher frequencies, with install conversion rates up by 23%2, and mobile gamers installing 84% more apps3.

“Snapchat is all about staying connected with your closest friends, but friendships aren’t just about conversations. They are often also based on shared experiences, which today includes gaming,” said Ben Schwerin, VP of Partnership, Snap Inc. “As gaming has increasingly become a visible part of the Snapchatter journey, it’s also an area that we aim to make easier for retailers and brands to reach Unity’s action-orientated gaming community through their Snapchat campaigns.”

From the same article, we get details on the new Unity integration of Snap technologies:

Available today in the Unity Asset Store, mobile game developers can also now leverage select features of Snap Kit to enhance gameplay and the game discovery experience:

– Snap Kit’s Login Kit allows gamers to use their Snapchat account as a quick way to sign up and log in to games.

– Snap Kit’s Creative Kit extends the experience by allowing users to share their gameplay, decorating still shots or 15-second videos with branded stickers, or attaching an AR lens that has been created with game branding to share with their Snapchat friends. The shares also include referral links back to the game, amplifying discovery and user acquisition for Unity developers to Snapchat’s 249 million daily active users4.

A Bitmoji integration will also be coming in early 2021, and will add a new level of personalization to gameplay. With Bitmoji for Game’s Unity SDK, developers will be able to leverage 3D Bitmoji to create a more immersive experience in games made with Unity. They will be able to bring players’ Bitmoji avatars into the center of gameplay, enabling players to be themselves in games like never before.

The SnapKit integration is already live on the Asset Store. For game developers utilizing Unity Ads, this should be an immediate win as a large group of advertisers are now going to be able to target their ad units, hopefully leading to an increase in revenue. You can learn more about the Unity & Snap partnership in the video below.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Phaser 3.50 Released

The open source cross platform HTML5 game framework just got a major update, Phaser 3.50. We’ve long been a fan of Phaser, going back to Phaser 2 with our Complete Phaser Game tutorial as well as our Phaser 3 tutorial video. The Phaser 3.50 release is called the single biggest Phaser release yet.

Details from the Phaser blog:

After 13 beta releases, over 200 resolved issues, thousands of lines of new code and the culmination of over 6 months incredibly hard work, Phaser 3.50 is finally here.

It’s not hyperbole or exaggeration when I say that Phaser 3.50 is the single biggest point release ever in the history of Phaser. There are quite literally hundreds of new features to explore, updates to key areas and of course bug fixes. I did actually try counting all the changes, but gave up after I’d reached 900 of them! Thankfully, they are, as always, meticulously detailed in the Change Log. The changes for 3.50 actually grew so large that I had to split them out from the main Change Log and put them into their own file.

However, don’t let this overwhelm you. A massive number of the changes are purely internal and while there are absolutely some API breaking changes in this release (hence the large version number jump), we’ve kept them as sensible as possible. We already know of lots of devs who have upgraded with minimal, or no, changes to their actual game code. We cannot guarantee that for everyone, of course, but depending on how complex your game is, the chances are good.

This release comes with several new examples and all of the existing examples have been audited to guarantee they are compatible with version 3.50. Major new features from Phaser 3.50 include an improved post processing effect pipeline, 3D Mesh game objects, multi texture support, isometric and hexagonal maps directly from Tiled support, Aseprite export support with animations, point lighting game objects and much much more.

Full details of the hundreds of changes in this release can be found in the release notes. Phaser is an open source project under the MIT source license and is available on GitHub. You can learn more about the Phaser 3.50 release in the video below.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Video Creator’s VFX Bundle

There is a new Humble Bundle of interest to game developers, the Humble Software Bundle: Video Creator’s VFX. This is a collection of stock footage in mostly HD and 2K formats from ActionVFX with a very reasonable license. As with all Humble Bundles this one is organized into tiers:

1$ Tier

  • Several single item packs including sparks, torches, explosions, glitches, lightning and more

15$ Tier

  • Several more single item packs including AR-15 and pistol fire, matte transitions and brush effects
  • Blood Mist Pack
  • Gun Smoke Pack
  • Sparks Pack
  • Bullet Hit Pack
  • Glitch Transitions Pack
  • Electric and Energy Pack
  • Grunge Overlay Pack
  • Lens Flare Pack

25$ Tier

  • Several more individual effects
  • Ground Bursts Pack
  • Gas Explosion Pack
  • Ground Fire Pack
  • Large Scale Dust Wave Pack
  • Small Scale Smoke Pack
  • Direct Blasts Pack
  • 2x Ink Packs
  • Glitch Overlay Pack
  • Lens Flare Transition Pack
  • Paper Transition Pack
  • Paper Backgrounds Pack

The files in the Video Creator’s VFX bundle are in .mov ProRes format, compatible with most existing video editing software. In the video below we go into more detail of the bundle and include showing some of the assets in action in HitFilm 16 Pro. As with all Humble Bundles, you can decide how your money is allocated between Humble, charity, the publisher and (thanks so much if you do!) to support GFS purchasing using this link.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Amazon Lumberyard 1.27 Released

Just two months after the previous release with the updated UI 2.0 and an improved installation process, Lumberyard 1.27 was recently released. Lumberyard is derived from CryEngine and is free to use so long as you use Amazon services (or host your own) for your online component. Yes, that means if you are creating a single player only game, Lumberyard is completely free to use. In this release the new 2.0 and object selection mode are now the defaults greatly improving the user experience. Other improvements in Lumberyard 1.27 include:

  • UI 2.0 General Availability – including more than 75 bug fixes and improvements.
  • NVIDIA Blast Support
    • With Python Asset Builder support to help you create more complicated and expressive KA-BOOMs!
  • Advanced features for NVIDIA Cloth, including complex cloth mesh support and constraints, and performance improvements
  • PhysX is replacing CryPhysics as our physics engine
  • New Gem updates to enhance the Twitch ChatPlay experience
  • Dynamic Content Gem (Cloud Canvas) versioning support
  • Project Configurator – If you have both Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio 2019 enabled in the Setup Assistant, you will now be asked which compiler to use when you rebuild your project.

The Lumberyard 1.27 blog post is available here while more comprehensive release notes are available here. Lumberyard can be download for Windows machines here and the source code is available on GitHub. Please note this is NOT an open source project, simply source available. If you want to see the new UI in action, check out Lumberyard 1.27 in the video below.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Unity 2020.2 Released

Unity Technologies have just released Unity 2020.2, only the second tech release in 2020. This is part of a new focus on quality over quantity as described on the Unity Blog:

We had plans for 2020. We were going to do things better to make Unity better for you. And we did. We reexamined our priorities. We listened to you. We committed to improving performance and quality of life for all users – so you can bring your vision to life faster.

Unity 2020.2 TECH Stream is packed with all the latest features for those with projects in pre-production, or simply for those who want to leverage the most cutting edge tech to achieve a competitive edge. This version of Unity also ensures a smooth upgrade path forward. To get started, download it here today.

Following up on our promise to improve your development experience, in 2020 we shifted our release philosophy. We prioritized quality over quantity and reduced the number of releases to two per year, giving our engineers an extended stabilization phase. 

Even with the increased focus on Unity 2020.2 there are several improvements in a number of different categories:

There is also an updated schedule of future Unity releases:

Unity Release Schedule
Unity Release Schedule Through 2022

There are more details on the Unity 2020.2 release available here. You can learn more about the Unity 2020.2 release in the video below. In related news, Unity also have a 50% off sale on the Unity Asset Store with an additional 5% off on > $120 purchases with the code GOODBYE2020.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Blender 2.92 Geometry Nodes

Hot on the heels of the Blender 2.91 release, Blender 2.92 is currently in Alpha and one of the most exciting new features is Geometry Nodes. Part of the everything as nodes strategy for future Blender development, the addition of geometry nodes will add procedural capabilities to Blender without requiring programming or scripting. Before the 2.92 alpha, Geometry Nodes were a separate branch with the project page available here.

When using Geometry Nodes, you are can create or modify geometry in your Blender scene using the new Geometry Node Editor. The process is very similar to the current way Shaders and Cycles materials are constructed. The selection of nodes are documented in the manual, however most descriptions are pretty sparse at this point. If you want to get started with nodes you need to run Blender 2.92 or later. Until it is formally released, the best place to get alpha and beta Blender releases is here.

There are two example projects to get you started. The best one currently is this one which shows how to use nodes to scatter rocks across your scene. There is another project that will showcase how to procedurally create a tree, however this project is currently just a place holder.

You can learn more about Blender 2.92 and Geometry Nodes in the video below.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Facebook Sponsor The Godot Game Engine

The Godot Game Engine have just been sponsored by Facebook Reality Labs. It comes in the form of a grant that is funding future XR (Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality) development. As a direct response to this grant, Bastiaan Olij is now going to be hired full time starting early 2021. In addition to being the lead developer on the Godot VR efforts, Bastiaan also worked on GDNative and other core Godot contributions. He also runs a very solid Godot technical YouTube channel available here.

Some details of the work he will be performing from the Godot news announcement:

  • OpenXR implementation for desktop and mobile. OpenXR is the new open standard for XR (Extended Reality, encompasses Advanced Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)). The OpenXR specification reached version 1.0 in 2019, and now has multiple conformant implementations by major XR players (Oculus, Microsoft, Valve, and more!). As an open source, cross-platform and vendor neutral game engine, we’re thrilled by the support that IHVs are giving to OpenXR and want to rely on it as our main interface.
  • Extending Godot’s input action system to support VR specific actions across all devices based on their respective capabilities (hand tracking, controller sensors, buttons).
  • Adapt the XR plugin system to the new Vulkan renderer design. While Godot 3.2’s XR support is functional, the upcoming Godot 4.0 release changes all the rendering backend and needs work to make XR functional again.
  • Implement Vulkan rendering on Android. This is necessary for mobile VR devices such as Oculus Quest 2, and will benefit all Godot users who want to make Android games.
  • Various rendering optimizations:
    • Stereoscopic rendering enhancements, providing details about the eye for which an image is rendered.
    • Support for compositor layers, which make it possible to render e.g. UI as an overlay without going through the eye buffer with lens distortion, allowing for sharper and more stable UI.
    • Support for variable rate shading in Vulkan, providing performance gains with techniques such as foveated rendering.
    • Rendering optimizations for mobile, implementing alternative techniques to the ones suitable on desktop platforms for better mobile performance.

This Godot Engine sponsorship from Facebook is their second in less than a month. In November it was announced that Facebook had become corporate sponsors of the open source Blender development fund. Even if you aren’t a big fan of Facebook, this investment in the Godot engine should be a win for everyone. You can learn more about the grant in the video below.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

UnrealCLR Awarded A Epic MegaGrant

The open source UnrealCLR project was just awarded an Epic MegaGrant. The Epic MegaGrant program was first announced back at GDC 2019 and consists of a $100M fund for supporting game and media development. Previous recipients have included Blender, Godot, RayLib, Laighter, ArmorPaint, Krita and more.

The UnrealCLR project (we previously covered including a small getting started tutorial) brings CLR or Common Language Runtime support to Unreal Engine. In a nutshell this enables C# and F# developers to develop in those languages in Unreal and even gives debugging and blueprint integration support. Even better it is implemented as a plugin so you do not have to build UE4 from source code. In their own words, UnrealCLR is described as:

UnrealCLR is a plugin which natively integrates .NET host into the Unreal Engine with the Common Language Runtime for direct execution of managed code to build a game/application logic using the full power of C# 9.0, F# 5.0, and .NET facilities with engine API. The project is aimed at stability, performance, and maintainability.

Details of the MegaGrant were announced on Twitter:

Congratulations to the UnrealCLR team! UnrealCLR is an open source project that is available here on GitHub under the LGPL license. You can learn more about UnrealCLR and the Epic MegaGrant program in the video below. If you want to get started with UnrealCLR we recommend you start here for more details.