Tag: GameDev News

Today at their GDC 2019 keynote, Google announced Stadia, their upcoming “gaming platform”, a server based streaming game service that runs on any Chrome enabled device.  Powered by custom GPUs designed by AMD using Vulkan on the Linux OS and spread across the same networking powering the Google search engine, Stadia promises to bring 4K at 60FPS gaming to the masses, with future support for 8K and 120FPS promised.

Being entirely server side, Stadia offers a number of innovative features.  Combined with their newly announced Stadia Controller, you can play games across any Chrome device and seamlessly transition your game between devices.  Since all the work, client and server are done on Google’s servers, they claim this will make cheating virtually impossible, while being able to scale existing game play up to thousands of users over night.  It also offered unique features like Streaming multiple sessions to the same endpoint, enabling flawless couch co-op, or the ability to use multiple server side GPUs for a single game instance enabling advanced special effects.

Stadia is built on top of familiar developer tools:

Unreal Engine

Epic Games’ official support for Stadia means you’ll have access to the latest technology and features of the world’s most powerful creation engine.

Unity

Unity is the world’s most widely used real-time 3D development platform, enabling developers to create rich, interactive experiences.

Custom tools

A suite of debugging and tuning tools help you get the most out of our platform, from fine-tuning streaming performance to diagnosing GPU crashes

Industry tools

Current dev tools include Havok^®, RenderDoc, Visual Studio, LLVM, AMD Radeon^TM2 GPU Profiler, IncrediBuild, Umbra^TM 3, FaceFX and Intelligent Music Systems, plus we’re constantly expanding to deliver a familiar development experience

For developers interested in getting started with Stadia, you can sign up at Stadia.dev.  For gamers interested in learning more visit Stadia.com for more details.  If you missed the GDC keynote, you can watch our condensed developer focused version in the video below.  We have done a similar treatment for the Unity keynote as well, available here.

GameDev News Engine Unity Unreal

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Unity just made the following tweet:

Essentially a vulnerability was detected in ALL versions of Unity for ALL versions of the Windows operating system, that enable a hacker to remotely run code by exploiting a security flaw in the Unity editor.  It DOES NOT affect games created with Unity and Mac and Linux users are unaffected.  Applying the patch may result in rebuilding asset bundles when you first open your project after the patch is applied.

The patch was released for all major versions after Unity 5.6, as well as a mitigation tool for people running versions of Unity before Unity 5.6.  Here are the download links for the patches and tools:

You can learn more details about the vulnerability and the corresponding patches/mitigation tool here.   If you are a Unity developer, I highly recommend you apply the patch immediately, especially as details of the exploit become more publically known.

GameDev News Unity

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Vectary is an online 3D application we covered late last year.  Since that video, Vectary 3.0 has been released with several UI changes, new features and massive changes to their subscription model.  The primary new features of Vectary 3.0 include:

• An Updated and streamlined user interface
• New getting started tutorial
• New deformers (Symmetry, Bend, Array, Boolean, Twist, Stretch, Spherify)
• New parametric primitive generation.
• Dark mode option

You can read more about the new features in the Vectary blog.  Perhaps the biggest change to Vectary is the new subscriptions, which are both more limited in the free form and vastly cheaper for the Premium plan.  Details of the new subscription tiers:

GameDev News

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Today at MWC 19 in Barcelona, Microsoft announced the second release of their HoloLens augment reality headset.  Costing an eye watering $3,500 or $150/month, the HoloLens is not a mass market or consumer device.  The HoloLens 2 includes improved sensors, a better display, improved ergonomics and more.  The Microsoft blog describes the 3 pillars of HoloLens 2 development:

Immersion is greatly enhanced by advancements across the board, including in the visual display system, making holograms even more vibrant and realistic. We have more than doubled the field of view in HoloLens 2, while maintaining the industry-leading holographic density of 47 pixels per degree of sight. HoloLens 2 contains a new display system that enables us to achieve these significant advances in performance at low power. We have also completely refreshed the way you interact with holograms in HoloLens 2. Taking advantage of our new time-of-flight depth sensor, combined with built-in AI and semantic understanding, HoloLens 2 enables direct manipulation of holograms with the same instinctual interactions you’d use with physical objects in the real world. In addition to the improvements in the display engine and direct manipulation of holograms, HoloLens 2 contains eye-tracking sensors that make interacting with holograms even more natural. You can log in with Windows Hello enterprise-grade authentication through iris recognition, making it easy for multiple people to quickly and securely share the device.

Comfort is enhanced by a more balanced center of gravity, the use of light carbon-fiber material and a new mechanism for donning the device without readjusting. We’ve improved the thermal management with new vapor chamber technology and accounted for the wide physiological variability in the size and shape of human heads by designing HoloLens 2 to comfortably adjust and fit almost anyone. The new dial-in fit system makes it comfortable to wear for hours on end, and you can keep your glasses on because HoloLens 2 adapts to you by sliding right over them. When it’s time to step out of mixed reality, flip the visor up and switch tasks in seconds. Together, these enhancements have more than tripled the measured comfort and ergonomics of the device.

Time-to-value is accelerated by Microsoft mixed reality applications like Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Layout and the new Dynamics 365 Guides applications. In addition to the in-box value, our ecosystem of mixed reality partners provides a broad range of offerings built on HoloLens that deliver value across a range of industries and use cases. This partner ecosystem is being supplemented by a new wave of mixed reality entrepreneurs who are realizing the potential of devices like HoloLens 2 and the Azure services that give them the spatial, speech and vision intelligence needed for mixed reality, plus battle-tested cloud services for storage, security and application insights.

Building on the unique capabilities of the original HoloLens, HoloLens 2 is the ultimate intelligent edge device. And when coupled with existing and new Azure services, HoloLens 2 becomes even more capable, right out of the box.

HoloLens 2 will be available this year at a price of $3,500. Bundles including Dynamics 365 Remote Assist start at $125/month. HoloLens 2 will be initially available in the United States, Japan, China, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Australia and New Zealand. Customers can preorder HoloLens 2 starting today at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/hololens/buy.

In addition to the HoloLens 2, Microsoft also announced the release of Azure Kinect, an updated and more powerful version of the Kinect motion sensor previously bundled with the XBox 360/One. 

The Azure Kinect DK is a developer kit that combines our industry-leading AI sensors in a single device. At its core is the time-of-flight depth sensor we developed for HoloLens 2, high-def RGB camera and a 7-microphone circular array that will enable development of advanced computer vision and speech solutions with Azure. It enables solutions that don’t just sense but understand the world — people, places, things around it. A good example of such a solution in the healthcare space is Ocuvera, which is using this technology to prevent patients from falling in hospitals. Every year in the U.S. alone, over 1 million hospital patients fall each year, and 11,000 of those falls are fatal. With Azure Kinect, the environmental precursors to a fall can be determined and a nurse notified to get to patients before they fall. Initially available in the U.S. and China, the Azure Kinect DK is available for preorder today at $399. Visit Azure.com/Kinect for more info.

Epic Games were also on-hand to announce Unreal Engine support for the HoloLens 2:

Epic Games today announced that support for Microsoft HoloLens 2 will be coming to Unreal Engine 4 starting in May 2019. The announcement was made during an onstage presentation by Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney during the Microsoft keynote at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
This development has been highly anticipated by augmented reality (AR) communities across entertainment, visualization, manufacturing, design, and education. In a future release, Unreal Engine will fully support HoloLens 2 with streaming and native platform integration. Unreal Engine support for HoloLens 1 currently enables streaming to the device.

GameDev News VR

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Finishing in hard cover form just in time for GTC 2019, NVidia and APress have team up to author Ray Tracing Gems, a book on real-time raytraced graphics development in the popular “Gems” format.  Even better, they are making digital chapters available as they are developed, free to those with a NVidia developer account (which is also free).  The chapters are distributed under the Creative Commons 4.0 International License and are available for download here.  Unfortunately Part 5 is currently missing and parts 6 and 7 are slated to be published later this week.

Here is the current table of contents from the RealTimeRendering homepage:

PART 1: RAY TRACING BASICS, editor: Chris Wyman

• 1. Ray Tracing Terminology, by Eric Haines and Peter Shirley
• 2. What is a Ray? by Peter Shirley, Ingo Wald, Tomas Akenine-Möller, and Eric Haines
• 3. Introduction to DirectX Raytracing, by Chris Wyman and Adam Marrs
• 4. A Planetarium Dome Master Camera, by John E. Stone
• 5. Computing Minima and Maxima of Subarrays, by Ingo Wald

PART 2: INTERSECTIONS AND EFFICIENCY, editor: Ingo Wald

• 6. A Fast and Robust Method for Avoiding Self-Intersection, by Carsten Wächter and Nikolaus Binder
• 7. Precision Improvements for Ray/Sphere Intersection, by Eric Haines, Johannes Günther, and Tomas Akenine-Möller
• 8. Cool Patches: A Geometric Approach to Ray/Bilinear Patch Intersections, by Alexander Reshetov
• 9. Multi-Hit Ray Tracing in DXR, by Christiaan Gribble
• 10. A Simple Load-Balancing Scheme with High Scaling Efficiency, by Dietger van Antwerpen, Daniel Seibert, and Alexander Keller

PART 3: REFLECTIONS, REFRACTIONS, AND SHADOWS, editor: Peter Shirley

• 11. Automatic Handling of Materials in Nested Volumes, by Carsten Wächter and Matthias Raab
• 12. A Microfacet-Based Shadowing Function to Solve the Bump Terminator Problem, by Alejandro Conty Estevez, Pascal Lecocq, and Clifford Stein
• 13. Ray Traced Shadows: Maintaining Real-Time Frame Rates, by Jakub Boksansky, Michael Wimmer, and Jiri Bittner
• 14. Ray-Guided Volumetric Water Caustics in Single Scattering Media with DXR, by Holger Gruen

PART 4: SAMPLING, editor: Alexander Keller

• 15. On the Importance of Sampling, by Matt Pharr
• 16. Sample Transformations Zoo, by Peter Shirley, Samuli Laine, David Hart, Matt Pharr, Petrik Clarberg, Eric Haines, Matthias Raab, and David Cline
• 17. Ignoring the Inconvenient When Tracing Rays, by Matt Pharr
• 18. Importance Sampling of Many Lights on the GPU, by Pierre Moreau and Petrik Clarberg

PART 5: DENOISING AND FILTERING, editor: Jacob Munkberg

• 19. Cinematic Rendering in UE4 with Real-Time Ray Tracing and Denoising, by Edward Liu, Ignacio Llamas, Juan Cañada, and Patrick Kelly
• 20. Texture Level of Detail Strategies for Real-Time Ray Tracing, by Tomas Akenine-Möller, Jim Nilsson, Magnus Andersson, Colin Barré-Brisebois, Robert Toth, and Tero Karras
• 21. Simple Environment Map Filtering Using Ray Cones and Ray Differentials, by Tomas Akenine-Möller and Jim Nilsson
• 22. Improving Temporal Antialiasing with Adaptive Ray Tracing, by Adam Marrs, Josef Spjut, Holger Gruen, Rahul Sathe, and Morgan McGuire

PART 6: HYBRID APPROACHES AND SYSTEMS, editor: Morgan McGuire

• 23. Interactive Light Map and Irradiance Volume Preview in Frostbite, by Diede Apers, Petter Edblom, Charles de Rousiers, and Sébastien Hillaire
• 24. Real-Time Global Illumination with Photon Mapping, by Niklas Smal and Maksim Aizenshtein
• 25. Hybrid Rendering for Real-Time Ray Tracing, by Colin Barré-Brisebois, Henrik Halén, Graham Wihlidal, Andrew Lauritzen, Jasper Bekkers, Tomasz Stachowiak, and Johan Andersson
• 26. Deferred Hybrid Path Tracing, by Thomas Schander, Clemens Musterle, and Stephan Bergmann
• 27. Interactive Ray Tracing Techniques for High-Fidelity Scientific Visualization, by John E. Stone

PART 7: GLOBAL ILLUMINATION, editor: Matt Pharr

• 28. Ray Tracing Inhomogeneous Volumes, by Matthias Raab
• 29. Efficient Particle Volume Splatting in a Ray Tracer, by Aaron Knoll, R. Keith Morley, Ingo Wald, Nick Leaf, and Peter Messmer
• 30. Caustics Using Screen Space Photon Mapping, by Hyuk Kim
• 31. Variance Reduction via Footprint Estimation in the Presence of Path Reuse, by Johannes Jendersie
• 32. Accurate Real-Time Specular Reflections with Radiance Caching, by Antti Hirvonen, Atte Seppälä, Maksim Aizenshtein, and Niklas Smal

Once compiled the electronic version of the book will remain freely downloadable, although in what formats has yet to be determined.

GameDev News Book

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A new game development related Humble Bundle, the Humble Fantasy GameDev Bundle has just gone live.  This bundle consists of thousands of art assets mostly with a fantasy RPG theme.  As always with Humble Bundles, a portion of your proceeds go to the creator, a portion go to the Humble team, a portion goes to charity and a portion can go to support this channel.

Humble Bundles are always split into pricing tiers, although in this case the content is heavily loaded toward the top price tier of $20 USD.  If you buy the top tier, you get all of the assets below it.  The Fantasy GameDev bundle consists of:

1$ Tier

• Potion Icons
• Game Chest
• SpellBook Page 01
• Wooden UI
• Fantasy Badges
• RPG Weapons Icons

17.31$ Tier

• TCG Card Design
• Armor Icon Pack
• Sci-Fi Skill Icon Pack
• Engineering Craft Icons
• Loot Icons
• Fishing Icons
• Flat Skills Icons
• Survival Armor Icons
• Resources Flat Icons
• Mobs Avatar Icons
• Character Avatar Icons
• Magic Badges

20$ Tier

• Fantasy Icon Megapack
• SpellBook Megapack
• TCG Cards Pack
• Action RPG Loot
• Action RPG Armor
• Fantasy Animate Avatars
• RPG Class Badges
• Western Icons
• GUI Megapack
• Monster Avatar Icons
• Fantasy Characters
• Fairytale Icons Megapack

The bundle is available here while you can see the contents of the Bundle in the video below.  Unfortunately the license is not clearly stated, however the Humble team made the following tweet:

GameDev News

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With the recent release of Godot 3.1 beta, it’s a good time to look at the future.  That is exactly what Juan Linietsky, lead developer on the Godot engine has done.  On Twitter he laid out his current roadmap for development priorities in Godot 4.0/4.1.

In a pair of tweets, he first discussed general Godot improvements, mostly around the renderer:

Then in a second tweet, he discussed Physics improvements:

Keep in mind, although Juan is the lead and perhaps most important developer on the Godot team, he is by no means the only one.  This means even though you don’t see a feature on the two above lists doesn’t mean it wont happen, as there is a vibrant community of developers adding new features to Godot.

GameDev News Godot

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Earlier today Improbable released the following statement regarding their cloud based networking service SpatialOS:

Today we must regretfully inform our community of the following developments.

• Unity’s block of SpatialOS: The game engine provider Unity recently changed (Dec 5) and then clarified directly to us (9 Jan) their terms of service to specifically disallow services like Improbable’s to function with their engine. This was previously freely possible in their terms, as with other major engines.
• What this means: Unity has clarified to us that this change effectively makes it a breach of terms to operate or create SpatialOS games using Unity, including in development and production games.
• Ongoing negotiation: Worryingly, this change occurred during an open commercial negotiation with the company to find a way to do more together.
• Revoked Unity license: In addition, Unity has revoked our ability to continue working with the engine for breaching the newly changed terms of service in an unspecified way.  This will affect our ability to support games.
• Continuing service for all other engines: Users of all other engines remain completely unaffected and we are working with other engine providers to see if they can help support engine transitions for customers hit by this change.

The updated Terms of Service section 2.4 from Unity now reads:

2.4 Streaming and Cloud Gaming Restrictions.

You may not directly or indirectly distribute the Unity Software, including the runtime portion of the Unity Software (the “Unity Runtime”), or your Project Content (if it incorporates the Unity Runtime) by means of streaming or broadcasting so that any portion of the Unity Software is primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet or other network to end user devices without a separate license or authorization from Unity. Without limiting the foregoing, you may not use a managed service running on cloud infrastructure (a “Managed Service”) or a specific integration of a binary add-on (for example, a plugin or SDK) or source code to be integrated in the Unity Software or Your Project Content incorporating the Unity Runtime (an “SDK Integration”) to install or execute the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server, unless such use of the Managed Service or SDK Integration has been specifically authorized by Unity.  Additionally, you may not integrate the Unity Runtime with a Managed Service or  SDK Integration and offer that integration to third parties for the purpose of installing or using the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server. For a list of Unity authorized streaming platforms, Managed Services and SDK Integrations, click here.This restriction does not prevent end users from remotely accessing your Project Content from an end user device that is running on another end user device.  You may not use a third party to directly or indirectly distribute or make available, stream, broadcast (through simulation or otherwise) any portion of the Unity Software unless that third party is authorized by Unity to provide such services.

In a nutshell, the new ToS seem to prevent running any portion of the Unity runtime on a cloud based install without prior licensing of the cloud hosting company and Unity directly.  The timing of this is quite interesting following on the heels of a partnership between Unity and Google to provide cloud based networking services.

In the meantime, developers that built their game around Unity and SpatialOS are going through a bit of a rollercoaster ride of emotions right now, such as Spilt Milk Studio:

Followed by:

Unity have not yet released a public content although their forums are quite… lively.

UPDATE: Tim Sweeney, founder and owner of Epic Games was quick to comment upon Unity’s gaff here and to reassure Unreal Engine developers that this wont happen to them:

GameDev News Unity

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Back in June of 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub for an eye watering 7.5 Billion dollars.  This transaction took several months to make it through regulatory approval, with Microsoft finally taking control near the end of 2018.  Yesterday, we saw the first official impact of the ownership change and for end users, it’s a pretty good change.  The free tier of GitHub now offers unlimited private code repos!  This was arguably the biggest reason for many small developers to actually pay for a premium account, so for these developers, they can downgrade to free and save their money.  Now the major limitation between Free and Pro accounts is the number of collaborators in a private repo, with the free tier have a limit of 3, while the pro tier has no such limit.

Details of the new changes from the Github blog:

• GitHub Free now includes unlimited private repositories. For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free. Many developers want to use private repos to apply for a job, work on a side project, or try something out in private before releasing it publicly. Starting today, those scenarios, and many more, are possible on GitHub at no cost. Public repositories are still free (of course—no changes there) and include unlimited collaborators.

• GitHub Enterprise is the new unified product for Enterprise Cloud (formerly GitHub Business Cloud) and Enterprise Server (formerly GitHub Enterprise). Organizations that want the flexibility to use GitHub in a cloud or self-hosted configuration can now access both at one per-seat price. And with GitHub Connect, these products can be securely linked, providing a hybrid option so developers can work seamlessly across both environments.

Pricing for individuals now breaks down as follows:

Not a bad first move…

GameDev News Tools

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