Tag: Review

Posted on by — Leave a comment

How to Install and Update Fedora Linux on Android using Termux

If you’re interested in running Linux on your Android device, you’re in luck! It’s possible to install Fedora Linux on Android using Termux. Termux is a terminal emulator for Android that allows you to run Linux commands and utilities on your phone or tablet. It does not replace Android. In this article, we’ll walk you through the process of installing Fedora Linux on Android using Termux and show you how to keep it up to date with the latest versions.

Step by step process

Step 1: Install Termux

To get started, you need to install Termux from the Google Play Store. Once you have Termux installed, open it up and type the following command to update the package list:

pkg update

Note: Termux requires Android >= 7 to run. Support for Android 5 and 6 was dropped at v0.83 on 2020-01-01, but you can find old builds on archive.org ( https://archive.org/details/termux-repositories-legacy/ ) if needed.

Step 2: Install Proot-Distro

Next, you’ll need to install Proot-Distro. Proot-Distro is a tool that allows you to install and run Linux distributions in a chroot environment. To install Proot-Distro, run the following command:

pkg install proot-distro

Step 3: Install Fedora

With Proot-Distro installed, you can now use it to install Fedora. To install Fedora, run the following command:

proot-distro install fedora

This will download and install the latest version of Fedora.

Step 4: Configure dnf

Now that you have Fedora installed, you’ll need to configure dnf, Fedora’s package manager. By default, dnf may try to install SELinux packages, which won’t work properly in a chroot environment. To prevent this, exclude SELinux packages installation by editing the dnf configuration file. Run the following command to open the dnf configuration file for editing :

cd ../usr/var/lib/proot-distro/installed-rootfs/fedora/etc/dnf
vi dnf.conf

You may substitute the nano editor for vi, if it is more to your liking. Once you’re in the file, find the line that says excludepkgs= and add *selinux* to the end of the line, like so:

excludepkgs=*selinux*

It may be necessary to add the excludepkgs line. Save these changes and exit the editor.

Step 5: Install a Desktop Environment (Optional)

Fedora comes with a number of desktop environments to choose from. If you’d like to install a desktop environment, you can do so with the following commands:

proot-distro login fedora
dnf groupinstall "Fedora Workstation" --skip-broken

This will switch from termux into the chroot Fedora installation and install the GNOME desktop environment, along with a number of other packages. If you prefer a different desktop environment, you can replace Fedora Workstation with the name of the group for your preferred environment.

Step 6: Install VNC Server (Optional)

If you plan on using your Fedora installation with a graphical interface, you’ll need to install a VNC server. This will allow you to connect to the Fedora desktop from another computer or device. To install the TigerVNC server, run the following command:

dnf install tigervnc-server.aarch64 -y

This will install the VNC server, along with any necessary dependencies.

Step 7: Upgrading Fedora

Now that you have Fedora installed, you’ll want to keep it up to date with the latest versions. To upgrade Fedora, run the following commands:

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
sudo dnf system-upgrade download –releasever=37
export DNF_SYSTEM_UPGRADE_NO_REBOOT=1
sudo -E dnf system-upgrade reboot
sudo -E dnf system-upgrade upgrade
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

First command sudo dnf upgrade –refresh refreshes the package cache and updates any installed packages.

The second command sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade installs the dnf-plugin-system-upgrade package, needed for the upgrade process.

The third command sudo dnf system-upgrade download –releasever=37 downloads the necessary packages for the upgrade to version 37 of Fedora. Replace 37 with the desired release version.

The fourth command export DNF_SYSTEM_UPGRADE_NO_REBOOT=1 sets an environment variable to prevent the system from rebooting after the upgrade.

The fifth command sudo -E dnf system-upgrade reboot reboots the system to start the upgrade process. Make sure to save any important work before running this command.

The sixth command sudo -E dnf system-upgrade upgrade performs the upgrade process.

Finally, the seventh command sudo dnf upgrade –refresh updates any remaining packages and ensures that your system is fully up to date.

Errors Encountered

During the installation and upgrade process, you may encounter errors. Two common errors are described below, along with their solutions.

Error 1: sudo: /etc/sudo.conf is owned by uid 1001, should be 0
Solution: This error occurs when the ownership of the sudo.conf file is incorrect. To fix this, run the following command:

chmod +s /usr/bin/sudo

This sets the setuid bit on the sudo command, which allows it to run with root privileges.

Error 2: filesystem package didn’t get upgraded post OS upgrade
Solution: This error occurs when the filesystem package is not upgraded during the upgrade process. To fix this, run the following commands:

sudo rpm -e --nodeps filesystem
dnf download filesystem

The first command removes the filesystem package, and the second command downloads the latest version of the package. If you encounter any errors during the upgrade process, you can use rpmrebuild to rebuild the package with any necessary modifications.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve shown you how to install Fedora Linux on Android using Termux and how to keep it up to date with the latest versions. While there may be some errors to overcome during the installation and upgrade process, following the steps outlined in this article should help you get Fedora up and running on your Android device in no time.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

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.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Hands-On With Sound Particles

Sound Particles is a one of a kind program for rendering 3D audio, capable of supporting thousands to millions of sounds in your simulation. Sound Particles has been battle tested used in big budgets movies such as Alita, Ready Player One and the new Star Wars films, as well as games such as Assassins Creed Origin.

Features of Sound Particles:

Sound Particles is a sound design software application capable of generating thousands (even millions) of sounds in a virtual 3D audio world. This immersive audio application will enable you to create highly complex sounds on the fly, which will ultimately enable you to design sound better and faster than ever.

Sound Design
The best 3D software for complex sound design. Used for film, videogames and virtual reality.

Postproduction
Working in postproduction? Use Sound Particles to add depth and richness to your sounds.

Immersive Audio
Supports immersive audio formats, such as Ambisonics, Dolby Atmos, Auro 3d and much more.

If you are interested in trying this unique audio application they have a fully functional demonstration available for Windows and Mac available here. All licenses are currently 50% off during Black Friday/Cyber Monday from indie to enterprise licenses. You can see Sound Particles in action in the video below. Sounds used during this demo were all downloaded from the excellent FreeSound.org website.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Blockbench 3D Modelling Application Review

BlockBench is a free 3d modelling, texturing and animation application for creating Minecraft style models. Blockbench is available on Windows, Mac and Linux, as well online.

Blockbench features include:

  • Blockbench is an all in one 3D Editor and Animator for Minecraft and other games and applications
  • Blockbench comes with a powerful animation editor. Animations can later be exported to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, rendered in Blender or Maya, or shared on Sketchfab.
  • Customize Blockbench with the built-in plugin store. Or create your own plugin and add a new feature or new format.
  • Collaborate with your friends on models, textures and animations – in real time, over the internet!
  • Blockbench is available in 12 languages, and the number is growing.
  • Create, edit and paint texture right inside the program. Create or import palettes, paint, draw shapes or automatically create templates.

You can learn more about Blockbench and see it in action in the video below.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Nomad Sculpt

If you’ve ever dreamed of doing 3D modelling on the go, today’s product Nomad Sculpt may be perfect for you. Nomad Sculpt is a 3D sculpting application designed from the ground up to be mobile first. It brings all the functionality you would expect from a modern 3D sculpting application like ZBrush, Mudbox or Blender but it runs on your Android or iOS mobile device!

Key features of Nomad Sculpt include:

  • Clay, Crease, Trim, Smooth, Mask and many other brushes
  • Stroke customization with falloff, alpha and other options
  • Matcap rendering or Physically Based Rendering
  • Vertex painting, with roughness/metalness control
  • Multiresolution sculpting
  • Voxel Uniform Remeshing, along with subtractive boolean
  • Dynamic Topology, to refine locally your mesh
  • Robust layers that supports topology change
  • Designed from the ground up for a mobile experience
  • Support pencil pressure (Apple Pencil, Samsung S Pen, etc)
  • OBJ, STL and glTF support

Nomad Sculpt is available on the App Store and the Android Store. It is $15 for the complete version, but there is a reasonably full functioning, export disabled trial version available. You can also see Nomad Sculpt in action in the hands-on review below.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Codecks Game Development Project Management

Codecks is a project management tool in the vein of Trello but aimed specifically at game developers. Modelled around the concept of a card game, decks are created for the various different tasks that need to be accomplished. Individual users interact in the form of hands, formed from cards either created locally or taken from community decks. There are also milestones as well as integration into several other technologies such as Github and Discord, as well as Trello import.

Key features of Codecks include:

Cards, Decks & Projects

Well designed collectable card games provide a great sense of the current state of your game. Let’s apply those design cues to project management.

Conversations & Notifications

Ever lost track of a comment thread? Conversations in Codecks are very explicit about who is part and whether it’s been resolved.

Time Tracking

Codecks’ optional time tracking allows you and your team to see how much time you’re actually spending on your tasks.

Search & Order

Use our advanced search and ordering options to dice and slice your work just the way you need.

Metrics & Reports

“Will we manage to release in time?” is a tough question. Especially in game development. Codecks is here to help.

Milestones

Plan for your release – one milestone at a time.

Codecks has a free tier available for teams up to 3 developers in size with several other pricing tiers available.

Codecks Pricing Tiers and Details

You can learn more about Codecks and see it in action in the video below.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Drag[en]gine Hands-On

The Drag[en]gine is a highly modular, open source (C++) game engine that has been under active development for several years. The Drag[en]gine’s modular approach is built around the GLEM concept breaking your game project into the Game Script, Launcher, Engine and Modules layers. The Game Script is implemented by default in Dragonscript, another open source project available here. Drag[en]gine is open source under the LGPL license on GitHub.

If you want to get started with Drag[en]gine you can download binaries for Linux and Windows available here, it’s most likely the IGDE file you want to start with. There are a number of samples to get you started available here. You can learn more about Drag[en]gine in the video below.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Cocos Creator 3.0 Tech Preview Released

The free Cocos Creator game engine just got a heavy duty upgrade today, with the release of Cocos Creator 3D technical preview. This release adds an all new 3D game engine to Cocos Creator, which was previously a 2D only game engine. The new underlying 3D engine has a complete PBR based rendering workflow based on real world lighting and camera models, with a modular design with support for terrain and physics out of the box.

Details from the Cocos Blog:

The technology behind games has grown exponentially since the birth of video games. Today with the creation of cloud computing, 5G networks, and faster mobile computers, the revolution to bring better 3D titles to your hands has become overwhelmingly apparent to game developers.

The Cocos engine started as a 2D game engine. In Cocos2d-x, we built the best open-source 2D engine in the world. We also tried to build 3D features upon the 2D-oriented architecture. But due to the lack of an editor and the challenge of growth on 3D features, it wasn’t very successful. That’s why we were determined to build an excellent editor tool: Cocos Creator. It was initially for 2D game development. But since 2017, we have already started to build a pure 3D engine for this tool. To push ourselves to give developers the best 3D development tool, we have re-designed the whole engine architecture and updated the editor’s core. On October 15th, 2019, we released Cocos Creator 3D, a dedicated experimental branch of China’s product. With a whole year’s effort, we have greatly improved the 3D engine architecture. We are finally merging the experimental 3D branch into the main Cocos Creator product to forge the awesome Cocos Creator 3.0, released later this year.

You can download Cocos Creator 3.0 preview for Windows and Mac now. Do be aware however there are a few caveats, especially for existing Cocos Creator developers:

  1. Projects built in Cocos Creator 1.X – 2.X will not work with this demo.
  2. Only 3D projects are available in this demo. Some 2D features like Spine, Tiled map, etc. are absent in this demo, but they will be included in the official 3.0 version.
  3. All projects built in the demo are exportable to 3.0 when it is released. So go crazy!
  4. We only recommend using TypeScript for future Cocos Creator 3.0 projects.

If you are interested in learning about Cocos Creator in general we have a tutorial series available on DevGa.me. You can see the new Cocos Creator 3.0 tech preview in action in the video below. A good place to start is the Cocos examples project available on GitHub. If you want to test Cocos Creator 3.0 using the same model as in the video, that model is available for free here on Sketchfab.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

NVIDIA RTX Voice Hands-On Review

In the age of COVID, with so many people working from home or in out of the ordinary scenarios, we may not necessarily have a ton of control over our environment. This means noise cancellation is perhaps more important than it has ever been. We are not immune to the effects and the audio quality of GFS videos have certainly suffered in the last few months. Enter RTX Voice.

If you are unaware, RTX Voice is a free plugin from NVIDIA that uses machine learning to filter out background noise. RTX Voice is described as:

NVIDIA RTX Voice is a new plugin that leverages NVIDIA RTX GPUs and their AI capabilities to remove distracting background noise from your broadcasts, voice chats, and remote video conferencing meetings. This allows users to “go live” or join a meeting without having to worry about unwanted sounds like loud keyboard typing or other ambient noise in noisy environments. RTX Voice also suppresses background noise from players in loud environments, making incoming audio easier to understand.

RTX Voice requires an RTX 2060 or higher and works with the vast majority of video capture applications including OBS Studio and Camtasia. The also offer RTX Voice support in their more comprehensive, but also free, Broadcast App.

We decided to put RTX Voice to the test in a simulated real world environment, using a Shure MV51 microphone and a Logitech Pro X headset (affiliate links). The tests were done with RTX Off and On with each device, as well as with background noise including typing and television. You can see (and hear!) the results in the video below (or watch on Odysee).

Posted on by — Leave a comment

FlatRedBall Engine Review

FlatRedBall is an open source C# based game engine with development dating back to 2005. It was originally built to run on-top of Managed Direct X, then was ported to XNA and when XNA was depreciated, it was again ported to run on top of the MonoGame framework.

FlatRedBall provides a layer of APIs and tooling on top of MonoGame designed to simplify the process of creating 2D games. You can currently create games for Windows (and UWP), Android and iOS, with Mac and Linux targets currently a work in progress. The heart of the tooling is Glue, which “glues” together the various other tools, including plugins for tasks such as UI development as well as support for the Tiled 2D map editor.

FlatRedBall is open source with the source code available on GitHub under the flexible and permissive MIT open source license. You can check out FlatRedBall in action in the video below (or here on Odysee). If you are interested in learning more or encounter a problem, they have an active Discord server available here.