Tag: Release

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Godot 3.2.4 Beta 4 Released

Godot have just released a new version of Godot 3.2.4, beta 4. We have already discussed several of the recent improvements in the 3.2.4 release including 2D Sprite Batching and the new improved FBX Importer. In addition to further improvements in those areas and various bug fixes, the beta 4 release brings a few new features to the table.

Details from the Godot Engine blog:

In particular, this build adds optional GDNative support to the HTML5 target, on top of the pre-existing optional multithreading support. The HTML5 export templates now come in three flavors which you can select in the export preset: normal, threads enabled and GDNative enabled. Multithreading and dynamic linking (GDNative) can’t be used at the same time due to current WebAssembly limitations.
Note: Threads enabled and GDNative enabled templates are only available for standard builds for now, as there are other issues to solve to make them work with Mono.

Additionally, beta 4 adds support for MP3 loading and playback! Until recently, the MP3 audio format was patent-encumbered and could therefore not be included in Godot, but the last patent expired in 2017, so a MP3 loader and decoded could finally be implemented.

There are also a number of fixes to the rewritten FBX importer which should improve compatibility, so if you ran into issues with it in previous builds, make sure to retry your models!

You can learn more about Godot 3.2.4 in the video below, including a quick tutorial showing how to use MP3’s in your Godot game.

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Wave Engine 3.1 Released

Wave Engine recently released version 3.1. Wave Engine is a completely free to use 3D game engine capable of targeting most platforms and XR devices. We have been keeping an eye on this engine since 2015 when we featured it in the Closer Look series. More recently we looked at Wave Engine again in 2019 when WaveEngine 3.0 was previewed after a long period of silence. After another long period of silence we received the 3.1 release which brings .NET 5 and C# 9 support as well as graphical improvements.

Details from a guest post on the DotNet team blog:

We are glad to announce that, aligned with Microsoft, we have just released WaveEngine 3.1 with official support for .NET 5 and C# 9. So if you are using C# and .NET 5, you can start creating 3D apps based on .NET 5 today. Download it from the WaveEngine download page right now and start creating 3D apps based on .NET 5 today. We would like to share with you our journey migrating from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5, as well as some of the new features made possible with .NET 5.

From .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5

To make this possible we started working on this one year ago, when we decide to rewrite our low-level graphics abstraction API to support the new Vulkan, DirectX12 and Metal graphics APIs. At that time, it was a project based on .NET Framework with an editor based on GTK# which had problems to support new resolutions, multiscreen or the new DPI standards. At that time, we were following all the great advances in performance that Microsoft was doing in .NET Core and the future framework called .NET 5 and we decided that we had to align our engine with this to take advantage of all the new performance features, so we started writing a new editor based on WPF and .NET Core and changed all our extensions and libraries to .NET Core. This took us one year of hard work but the results comparing our old version 2.5 and the new one 3.1 in terms of performance and memory usage are awesome, around 4-5x faster.

Now we have official support for .NET 5 and this technology is ready for .NET 6 so we are glad to become one of the first engines to support it.

In the video below we review Wave Engine 3.1. All of the samples used in the video are available on GitHub. Please note this repository should not be cloned, it simply links to a different repository for each sample.

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Unreal Engine 4.26 Released

Epic Games have just release UE 4.26. In this release we see features such as hair and anisotrophy reach production ready status. Additionally there is a new water simulation system (previewed here) and better integration of the new Chaos Physics System (tutorial here) and a brand new system for creating better skies, lighting and environmental clouds. Additionally there were several advancements on the film making side of the equation along side hundreds of other small improvements and bug fixes. With each new Unreal Engine release more and more functionality traditionally done in your DCC tool of choice such as modelling, rigging, animating and sculpting are being added to Unreal.

A summary of new features from the Unreal Engine 4.26 release notes:

The production-ready Hair, Fur, and Feathers system enables you to design the most believable humans and animals. You can use the Volumetric Cloud component along with the Sky Atmosphere and Sky Light to author and render realistic or stylized skies, clouds, and other atmospheric effects with full artistic freedom. The new Water System makes it possible to create believable bodies of water within your landscape terrains that react with your characters, vehicles, and weapons. With an improved and expanded feature set, Chaos physics now lets you simulate Vehicles, Cloth, and Ragdolls in addition to Rigid Bodies so every aspect of the environment comes to life.

Sequencer now works in conjunction with Control Rig and the new full-body IK solution to create new animations inside of Sequencer, reducing the need to use external tools. Movie Render Queue (formerly known as High Quality Media Export) has been enhanced to support render passes enabling further enhancements to be made to the final image in a downstream compositing application. nDisplay multi-display rendering is easier to set up and configure in addition to enabling more pixels to be rendered at a higher frame rate, thus increasing performance and supporting larger LED volumes with existing hardware. The Collaborative Viewer Template has been significantly improved to enhance the collaborative design review experience, and enable more users to join a session. The Remote Control API has been improved to seamlessly connect properties and functionality in Unreal Editor to UI widgets giving users the ability to quickly change properties from an external device, such as an artist on stage changing the sky rotation or the sun position from an iPad.

In the video below we take a quick look at the new water system as well as a quick tutorial on creating Hair alembic files using Blender for export to Unreal Engine, then quickly showcase the new Groom hair functionality.

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Quixel Mixer 2020.1.6 Released

Hot on the heels of the Quixel Bridge release, today Quixel released version 2020.1.6 of Quixel Mixer. Quixel Mixer is a texture generation tool that is completely free for everybody and includes MegaScans integration for Unreal Engine users. The 2020.1.6 release adds the ability to export masks, as well as 65 new free smart materials.

Details of the release from the Quixel blog:

Following the support of 3D Texturing and Smart Materials, this Quixel Mixer 2020.1.6 adds 65 new scan-based Smart Materials along with a powerful new feature: advanced mask export. This highly requested feature enables you to combine, channel pack and export advanced masks, leveraging Mixer’s versatile mask stack and material blending engine.

The ability to utilize these masks in other applications allows you to easily create high-quality variations of your materials directly inside the app of your choice.

Mixer is available for everyone, for free, forever, including its enormous base library of hundreds of free scans and Smart Materials. What’s more — Unreal Engine users have access to the entire Megascans library for free, right within Mixer. 

Quixel is available for download here for Windows and Mac OS. You can learn more about the 2020.1.6 release in the video below.

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Blender 2.91 Released

Blender 2.91 was released today another step forward in the rapidly improving open source 3D application. As with other recent releases this one includes several sculpting improvements, especially on the cloth brushes including the ability to collide with other objects in your scene. Other sculpting improvements include several new gesture tools, support for sculpting on the base mesh of a multi-res mesh and the addition of boundary brushes to control the edges of sculpted meshes.

Sculpting Cloth In Blender
Blender 2.91 Cloth Sculpting

Another major feature includes improved Boolean support including a new exact solver as well as the ability to perform boolean operations on collections of objects. The new exact solver is much more accurate but at the cost of running slower. This improvement is a welcome one, as the boolean functionality in Blender 2.8x was one of the few areas where it was worse than the previous releases.

In addition to the improving volumetric support in the form of openVDB support, Blender 2.91 also has the ability to generate volumes from meshes, as well as apply displacements to those volumes. There are a number of other improvements in Blender 2.91 from EEVEE to Grease Pencil. Learn more about the release in the release notes.

You can learn more about the Blender release, including several new features demonstrated in the video below. The 2.91 splash screen is the work of Robin Tran, a concept artist at UbiSoft Massive, you can see more shots here. Blender is available on all major platforms as a free download here, assuming of course their servers are currently on fire due to demand! If you are interested at looking even further into the future of Blender, Blender 2.92 is currently available here in alpha( soon to be beta) form.

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Unigine 2.13 Released

The Unigine engine just released version 2.13. The new release includes an all new GPU based lightmapping tool, a new terrain generation tool, improved clouds, better lighting and a whole lot more. Since Unigine 2.11 there is a free community version available making Unigine a lot more viable for indie game developers.

Highlights of the release include:

  • GPU Lightmapper tool
  • Introducing SRAA (Subpixel Reconstruction Anti-Aliasing)
  • Upgraded 3D volumetric clouds
  • Performance optimizations for vast forest rendering
  • New iteration of the terrain generation tool with online GIS sources support (experimental)
  • Adaptive hardware tessellation for the mesh_base material
  • Project Build tool: extended functionality and a standalone console-based version
  • New samples (LiDAR sensor, night city lights, helicopter winch)
  • Introducing 3D scans library

For further information on the release be sure to check the much more in-depth release notes or watch the video below.

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Quixel Release Quixel Bridge 2020.4

Quixel have just released Quixel Bridge 2020.4 with a heavy focus on making the tool easier to use. Quixel Bridge is a cross platform (Linux, Windows and Mac), free tool for organizing your textures, as well as acting as a communication tool between your data and your game engine or DCC tool of choice. Quixel Bridge also acts as a handy interface to Megascans massive texture and 3D object library, a library that is completely free for Unreal Engine users!

Highlights of the 2020.4 release from the Quixel blog:

At the beginning of this year, we overhauled the Bridge browsing experience to help you discover new, relevant content faster than ever before. As part of this ongoing effort to simplify the creative experience for artists, this latest update comes packed with enhancements to the Asset Preview Panel, the download and export settings, and other improvements that make Bridge even easier to use.

Key new features include:

  • Redesigned Asset Preview Panel
  • Simplified download and export settings
  • Managing Plugins made easier
  • Simpler initial set up
  • Deeper categorization

Quixel Bridge is available as a free download here and you can learn more about the 2020.4 release in the video below.