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.
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.
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:
Projects built in Cocos Creator 1.X – 2.X will not work with this demo.
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.
All projects built in the demo are exportable to 3.0 when it is released. So go crazy!
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.
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).
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.
ParticleShop is one of the applications that is featured in the current Be A Creative SuperHero Bundle currently running on Humble. This bundle is a collection of graphical applications and add-ons from Corel. Today we are taking a hands-on look at ParticleShop, a PhotoShop plugin (also compatible with PaintShop Pro 2020 and Affinity Photo) that brings the particle system based brushes from Corel Painter to these other applications.
ParticleShop is described as:
Create stunning image enhancements with ParticleShop, a powerful Adobe® Photoshop® brush plugin powered by Painter. Experience NEW expressive Dynamic Speckle brushes and living grab-and-go Particle brushes and that are easy to use with a pressure sensitive tablet, touchscreen or mouse. Use your creativity and imagination to artistically enhance photos, designs and illustrations with strokes of genius.
We’ve done all of the work for you! Immediately start creating with one of 11 built-in custom brushes. Whether you’re looking to add playful Dynamic Speckle flourishes or compelling Particle flare to your work, you’ll find just the brush you need to artistically enhance your imagery and exponentially increase your range of painting expertise. Plus, explore the additional brush packs that were designed to match your specific workflow needs.
Out of the box ParticleShop ships with a pack with 11 brushes, although the Bundle contains more than a half a dozen additional brush packs. You can see ParticleShop in action, including instructions on how to install in PaintShop Pro and Affinity Photo, as well as showcasing several of the brush packs, in the video below.
The Wick Editor is a surprisingly capable free and open source tool that defies categorisation. At it’s core it’s a 2D graphic and animation tool, but it also has programmability features making it capable of creating simple games. It supports publishing animated GIFs, movies, soundtracks, sprite sequences and even single click html applications.
The Wick Editor is a free and open-source tool for creating games, animations, and everything in-between. It’s designed to be the most accessible tool for creating multimedia projects on the web.
The Wick Editor is a hybrid of an animation tool and a coding environment, heavily inspired by similar tools such as Flash, HyperCard, and Scratch. It was developed in response to a growing need for such a tool for the modern web.
As mentioned the project is open source with the code hosted on GitHub under the GPL v3 license. The Wick Editor runs entirely in the browser and can be run by visiting https://editor.wickeditor.com/. You can also install locally and run using node and npm. You can learn more about Wick Editor and see it in action in the video below (or watch on Odysee).
In the next part in our going look at key extensions in the Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle, today we are looking at Peek from Ludiq. In previous features we have looked at UModeler and Clayxels if you are interested in learning more.
Peek is a powerful add-on the greatly changes the way you work with Unity, including features like:
Dynamic toolbars the replace the requirement for the Inspector windows
Pop up support on Ctrl+F replacing the need for the Hierarchy window
Sticky drag and drop
Quick reference inspection
Creator to quickly create and place objects and instances in your scene
Multi-object grouping
You can see Peek and most of these features in action in the video below (or here on Odysee). Peek is regularly $60 on the Unity Asset Store and is half that price (with dozens of other assets and games) in the current Bundle, expiring in 9 days.
The Castle Game Engine is a pretty unique option. It’s a long running open source 2D/3D game engine for Pascal and Delphi developers with a recent emphasis on improving the editing experience. Hand and hand with the Castle engine is the Lazarus IDE and the open source Pascal implementation Free Pascal, which are required for Castle game development.
Top features of Castle include:
Use any 3D or 2D software to create your models in various formats: glTF, X3D, VRML, Spine JSON, Collada…
Develop cross-platform applications, for desktop (Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD…), mobile (Android, iOS), consoles (Nintendo Switch) and other devices (Raspberry Pi).
Visual editor to design games UI and to build applications, powerful command-line build tool under the hood.
Optimized rendering with a lot of graphic effects (physically-based rendering, shadows, mirrors, bump mapping, shader effects, gamma correction…).
Build and edit the scene graph (X3D) at runtime. Create 3D processing, visualization tools and CAD applications.
Extensible system for game objects, with physics, creatures with AI and navmesh, and more.
Access numerous services, like in-app purchases and game services on mobile devices.
Create cross-platform user-interface with anchors and automatic scaling.
Code in modern Object Pascal, an efficient OOP language with cross-platform open-source compiler (FPC), compiled to a native optimized code.
If you are interested in learning more about the Castle game engine be sure to check out the video below (or watch it here on Odysee). The Castle developers have also recently released a document making it easier for Unity developers to get up to speed with key concepts in Castle, which is available here. If you are interested in getting started with Castle and Lazarus, step by step instructions are available here.
VPainter is an open source free add-on for the Godot game engine that enables you to paint directly on 3D models. There are two modes of operation, one is to paint on the vertices of the mesh, while the second involves blending up to 4 different textures into one seamless material.
VPainter is open source MIT licensed and hosted on GitHub. To get started, merely clone (git clone _____) the repository https://github.com/tomankirilov/VPainter.git.
Next, copy the addons folder into your Godot project, merging it if you already have an addons directory.
Next, fire up the Godot Engine, go to Project->Project Settings, then select the Plugins tab and click enable:
VPainter is now enabled and will appear in the editor window when a MeshInstance is selected. For further details on how to use VPainter or to simply see it in action, check out the video below.
Currently featured in the Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle as well as being 50% off on the Unity Asset Store, Clayxel is an asset that extends Unity to add support for modelling then animating clay-like 3D objects.
Clayxels is described on the Store page as:
Clayxels is an interactive volumetric toolkit to sculpt models in editor and in game. It uses voxels to generate a lightweight point-cloud that can be changed in real-time and used in a whole bunch of different ways, all without any heavy pixel ray-marching. Works both in editor and in game, everything made with clayxels can be changed interactively at any time.
Works with all render pipelines, built-in, URP, HDRP.
It is important to note that Clayxel currently *does not* support the WebGL targets. In the video below we go hands-on with Clayxel, give you an overview of it’s capabilities and show you a simple tutorial on how to get up and running creation clay objects in your Unity game. The Unity Humble Bundle runs until the end of September, so don’t miss out if Clayxel looks interesting to you. Another asset in the bundle, UModeler, was covered in an earlier GFS post. The above links contain an affiliate code that pays a small commission to GameFromScratch if used to purchase (and thanks so much if you do!).
