Tag: GameDev News

Microsoft have just joined the Blender Development Fund as a Gold Sponsor, joining the likes of Epic Games, Ubisoft, AMD and NVIDIA.  Microsoft are currently using Blender in some in-house projects and will be supporting the Blender Development fund to the tune of 30K Euro per year.  Details of the deal from the Blender website:

Microsoft makes use of Blender to generate synthetic 3D models and images of humans that can be used to train AI models. For researchers, having access to high quality free/opensource 3D software has proven to be of great benefit for scientific projects. You can check some of their work here.

To express their support, Microsoft is joining the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a Corporate Gold member per July 1st, 2020.

We at Blender are very proud of this support statement, it’s another important signal that the industry migrates to open source and finds ways to contribute to it.

You can learn more about the announcement and development fund in the video below.  If you are afraid of these corporate influences taking over Blender please be sure to watch this video as well.

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GameDev News Blender

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There is a new Humble Bundle of interest to game developers, the Humble Book Bundle: Programming Languages by O’Reilly bundle.  This is a collection of ebooks covering a variety of programming languages.  This bundle includes the following tiers:

1$ Tier

• 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know
• Think Julia
• Programming Scala
• Introducing Go
• Learning Perl

8$ Tier

• Learning SQL
• Programming PHP
• R Cookbook
• Head First Kotlin
• Using Ayncio in Python

15$ Tier

• Programming Rust
• C# 8 in a Nutshell
• Fluent Python
• Learning Java
• Programming TypeScript

As with all Humbles, you can decide how your money is allocated, between Humble, charity, the publisher and if you so choose (and thanks a ton if you do!) to support GFS by using this link.  You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.

GameDev News Book Sale

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Stride, the game engine previously known as Xenko (and Paradox before that), just released version 4.0.  Details of the release from the Stride 4 release notes (no link possible currently).

Thanks to a substantial contribution from Sean Boettger and sponsored by David Jeske, Stride now supports Voxel Cone Tracing GI!

.NET Core

As a first step toward .NET 5, Stride editor and toolchain is now running with .NET Core! Runtime has been working with .NET Core for a few versions already.  This allows to have scripts and custom assets in a project targetting .NET Standard 2.1 or .NET Core.  If you have scripts or custom assets in a .NET Framework project rather than a .NET Standard project, you can still choose between .NET Core and .NET Framework within the launcher. Framework will also be displayed in Game Studio toolbar for easier identification while both coexist.

.NET Framework version can be considered deprecated and will likely be removed in future release (likely 4.1) to allow us to take full advantage of C# 8.0 and soon-to-come C# 9.0.  We also expect dropping .NET Framework and supporting only .NET Core will greatly simplify our installation process since we won’t depend on specific workloads or packages of Visual Studio being installed anymore. This was a recurring issue with our users.  Later down the road, we plan to switch to .NET 5 once it’s in good enough shape.

GPU Instancing

TODO

Graphics API

Different selection mechanism + Vulkan improvements. There’s been a big overhaul on Stride build system to make Graphics API selection work in a more future-proof way.  It was previously relying on custom RuntimeIdentifier being set in the solution. This didn’t work very well because it was completely orthogonal to existing RuntimeIdentifier, and sometimes not having good fallbacks.  From now on, user project will use StrideGraphicsApi in the .csproj project file to specify the graphics API. We hope to expose this in the editor later.

We also took the opportunity to improve state of Vulkan renderer (thanks to a switch to Vortice.Vulkan bindings from Amer Koleci) and automatize graphics unit tests, currently running for D3D11 and Vulkan. It’s still a work in progress so expect more in future releases.

Documentation & Tutorials

The first 10 C# beginner tutorials are recorded and uploaded to the official Stride Youtube channel. These videos are the video equivalent of the existing online documentation for the C# beginner template tutorials and the ‘new project’ template when creating a new project from the Stride launcher. The C# beginner series should be fully recorded by the end of July 2020. After those videos are done, Jorn will put his focus on the C# Intermediate project template.

You can learn more about the Stride 4 release in the video below.

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GameDev News C# Paradox

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Voxel Tools is an open source and free C++ module for the Godot game engine that adds Voxel terrain support.  You can create both blocky Minecraft style maps, or smoothed realistic maps.

Details of Voxel Tools features:

• Realtime editable, 3D based terrain (Unlike a heightmap based terrain, this allows for overhangs, tunnels, and user creation/destruction)
• Physics based collision and raycast support
• Infinite terrains made by paging sections in and out
• Voxel data is streamed from a variety of sources, which includes the ability to write your own generators
• Minecraft-style blocky voxel terrain, with multiple materials and baked ambient occlusion
• Smooth terrain using Transvoxel
• Levels of detail for smooth terrain
• Voxel storage using 8-bit channels for any general purpose

Since Voxel Tools are implemented as C++ modules (learn more about that topic here), you are required to recompile the Godot engine.  Thankfully however Voxel Tools ships with precompiled versions available for all platforms here.  The sample level used in the below video can be cloned from this repository and the documentation is available here.

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GameDev News Godot

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Today Epic Games announced an update to their ongoing Epic MegaGrants program, a series of grants to better the world of game development, media creation and open source technologies that have supported such products as Godot and Blender.  They are approaching the halfway mark with 600 recipients representing a total of $42M USD in grants thus far.  As part of the announcement they also revealed a new partnership with AMD:

Just over one year ago, we launched Epic MegaGrants, a $100 million program to globally accelerate the work of talented teams and individuals working with Unreal Engine, 3D graphics tools, and open source software. Today, we are pleased to reveal that Epic Games has issued $42 million in total financial support to more than 600 remarkable recipients to date as part of the Epic MegaGrants program.

This announcement follows a record initial round of support, which saw Epic MegaGrants extended to more than 200 recipients, surpassing the four-year distributed total of the initiative’s predecessor, Unreal Dev Grants, in only eight months.

In addition to this news, we are happy to share that AMD has introduced their support to Epic MegaGrants with the generous contribution of 200 AMD Ryzen™ 7 3800X desktop processors eligible for giveaway to new and existing recipients. There is no deadline to apply, and hardware is available on a first-come, first-served basis, based on project merit. We welcome creators across games, entertainment, architecture, and many other industries to apply now via online submission for an AMD Ryzen™ 7 3800X desktop processor.

You can learn more about the status of the MegaGrants program on the Unreal Engine blog or by watching the video below.

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GameDev News Unreal

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Hot on the heels of yesterdays announcement that Bolt for Unity is now free, today we have the release of Unity 2020.1.  There are several new features and improvements in this release including:

• improvements to the package management system and package curation
• new packages in preview including
• Profile Analyzer
• Kinematica
• Cinemachine 2.6
• 2D Physics improvements, including the 2D Physics Sample being updated.
• UI improvements including focused inspector, prefab improvements and more
• new verified packages including:
• Cinemachine 2.5
• Input System
• camera stacking in the URP
• lightmapper improvements
• AR foundation SDK and platform support improvements
• device simulator greater device support
• other fixes, improvements and features

For more details be sure to check out the Unity blog or the much more in-depth Unity 2020.1 release notes.  Learn more about this release in the video below.

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GameDev News Unity

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There is a new Humble Bundle of interest to game developers, the Humble JavaScript Coding Bundle.  This bundle consists of JavaScript themed courses from Zenva,  many of which are themed around game development related topics.  Do be aware that many of the included courses have been included in prior Humble Bundles, so be sure to check your inventory before purchasing.  As with all Humble Bundles, this bundle is organized into tiers:

1$ Tier

• Create Interactive Pages with JavaScript and the DOM API
• Intro to RPG Development with Phaser
• Bite-Sized Responsive Web Design
• The Complete Beginner’s JavaScript Course
• JavaScript Foundations

15$ Tier

• Build an RPG Adventure in Phaser
• Azure Deployment for Node.js Applications
• AWS Deployment for Node.js Applications
• Build JavaScript Applications with Vue.js
• Node.js and Express for Beginners
• Modern JavaScript – From ES6 to ES9
• Craft Web Forms with React
• Discover React for Web Applications

25$ Tier

• Server-Side Rendered Webapps with Node.js, Expresss and MongoDB
• Build a Tower Defense Game with Phaser 3
• WebVR for Beginners – Build VR Websites with A-Frame
• Chat and Player Enhancements for Phaser MMORPGs
• Phaser Login System with Express API
• Real-Time Server Communication with Socket.IO
• Discover Developer Tools for JavaScript Apps
• Web-Based Authentication UI for Express and Node.js
• User Authentication with MongoDB and Express
• Node.js For Beginners – Create Server Side Apps with JavaScript
• JavaScript Game Development – Kontra.js
• Intermediate React and Redux

If you purchase this bundle using this link, you can decide how your money is allocated, including (and thanks so much if you do!) to support GFS.  There is no video to go with this Bundle as we have covered similar bundles such as this one several times in the past.

GameDev News JavaScript Phaser Sale

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Unity acquired Bolt from Ludiq back in May of 2020 although no further announcements were made.  Today however that all changed when Unity announced that the Bolt visual scripting solution for the Unity game engine will now be free for all tiers of Unity, including the free or personal tiers.  Bolt is available immediately as a free download on the Unity Asset Store.

Details from the Unity blog:

Bolt visual scripting is now included in all Unity plans, at no additional cost.

We believe the world is a better place with more creators in it, and we know that visual scripting is a critical part of bringing ideas to life quickly in Unity.

Bolt is now available for download by all Unity users through the Unity Asset Store. Users who purchased Bolt after Unity made the acquisition announcement on May 4, 2020 will receive a refund in the amount of their purchase. We’ll be sending an email to those users within the next two weeks.

The next version of Bolt, Bolt 2, which will bring improvements in capability, scalability, performance, and ease of use is in development. When it arrives, Bolt 2 will also be included in all Unity plans at no additional cost. More information to come later this year.

We are committed to providing a great visual scripting experience for users for all types of projects, regardless of the architecture. Bolt is an acceleration of this mission towards providing that experience. We’re also working to refine our various node-based tools to improve the general user experience progressively, over time, across the Editor.

Again you can learn more about Bolt and download it here.  Learn more about the Bolt release in the video below.

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GameDev News Unity

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After a recommendation from the Gamefromscratch discord server, today we take a look at acdsee Video Studio 3 that is available for free until July 29th, if registered with a valid email address.  Acdsee Video Studio enables you to capture, edit and produce video in an easy to use way.

Acdsee Video Studio is described as:

With a simple, easy-to-master interface, powerful 64-bit performance, and high res results, ACDSee Video Studio 3 provides value-based video editing without the learning curve. Now featuring higher quality screen recording, support for still images, 3x faster recording save times, 4K rendering, a variety of creative filters, audio effects, flexible tracks that you can layer and blend, and much more, ACDSee Video Studio 3 is versatile content creation in one lean package.

Engaging your audience, students, employees, and customers has never been this painless. ACDSee Video Studio allows for the quick creation of accessible media content and takes the mystery out of distribution with easy sharing solutions.

It’s amazing to see just how much of a copy this program is to Camtasia Studio, as you can see in the video below.

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GameDev News Applications

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