Material Maker 0.8 was just released.  Material Maker is a free procedural texture generation software that was built on top of the Godot game engine.  We previously covered Material Maker in this video.  The 0.8 release brings several new features including several new nodes and examples.

Details from the itch.io page:

Regressions and incompatibilities

Bad news come first, as always:

• 2D SDF nodes do not output greyscale information and cannot be directly connected to greyscale/color/RGBA inputs anymore. you will have to use the sdShow Node

User interface

• the 2D and 3D previews are now in separate tabs
• the 3D preview in the background of the graph pane can now be shown and hidden using the “cube” button at the bottom left of the graph view and controlled independently,
• the 2D preview now shows a tiled version of the selected node (so it’s easy to check the result is seamless)
• the 2D preview now has controls that can be associated to (float) node parameters (this applies mainly to shape/transform nodes)the UI will now be dimmed when exiting the application (this change was contributed by Calinou)

Nodes and code generation

• 2 new types of node inputs/outputs have been added for 2D and 3D signed distance functions. Both types have a custom preview (distance field for 2DSDF and shaded scene for 3DSDF)
• shader nodes inputs now have a “function” attribute. When this option is selected, the input is generated as a function and is usable in instance Functions. This feature made all 3D SDF nodes possible.
• a few problems in convolution nodes have been fixed

New and improved nodes

• all 2D signed distance functions have been modified to use the 2DSDF inputs/outputs (that are shown in orange). The sdShow node is now the only way to generate an image. Added 2DSDF transform and morph nodes.
• the new 3D signed distance functions nodes can be used to describe 3D shapes. Many shapes (sphere, box, capsule, torus, cylinder…), transforms (translate, rotate, scale), operators (boolean, repeat, extrusion, revolution…) are provided and the Render node can be used to generate a height map and a normal map from 3DSDF information. All this is based on ray marching and can be used to describe 3D objects that can then be spread on the textures, as demonstrated in the “skulls” and “pile_of_bricks” examples.
• the new 3D box and a sphere nodes are not based on 3DSDF and just output a height map
• the new “workflow” nodes can be used to define base materials and mix them using height/orientation/offset maps, and to ultimately create complex materials without drawing spaghetti monsters in the graph view. A few simple base materials are provided in the node library as templates. The new “marble” and the updated “medieval_wall” examples show how to use all those nodes.

• the bricks node has been improved with round brick corners and output UV information for each brick and each brick corner. Also added an output that gives brick orientation.
• the new CustomUV node uses one of its input as coordinates to read the other input and can thus be used to implement psychedelic image transforms
• the new generic truchet node tiles its input, randomly flipping it horizontally, vertically or both
• the beehive node just outputs hexagonal tiles
• the new convolution nodes are 3 edge detectors and a sharpen filter
• the normal map node has a new option to disable its input buffer. The buffer should still be used when the input is complex, but disabling it will generate smoother normal maps
• the new greyscale node converts color input to greyscale with a choice of 5 algorithms
• the new swap channels node replaces all channels (R, G, B, A) of its output with 0, 1 or a (optionnally inverted) channel of its input

Material Maker 0.8 is available for download for Windows and Linux here.  You can learn more about Material Maker 0.8 in the video below.

GameDev News Applications

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A tinkerer once made a maze. To test it, he sent a little mouse to work their way out. You are that mouse, and Maze Machina is quite a clever, vexing little contraption: simultaneously stressful and accessible. The design is brilliant and such fun to play, but the margins of error are also pretty tight, at least in the modes with turn pressure.

Tinytouchtales has been a quality outfit for years now, with the games it produces being basically guaranteed day-one purchases from myself and quite a few others. In this respect the latest is also certifiably good, but it should additionally be praised for its juxtaposition of incredible simplicity and unflinching difficulty. It’s even more pared-down than you’d think, yet chock-full of interactions and interesting edge cases.

So far, Arnold Rauers’ niche has always been single-player turned-based solitaire games, with the other big ticket games (Card Crawl, Card Thief, Miracle Merchant) utilizing cards. Well, Maze Machina is solitaire all right, but it uses a randomized board of items, not cards. The goal is straightforward: grab the key, make your way to the level exit, as quick as you can. To accomplish this, you have to use items. The tile is the effect, the location is the device, just as with Michael Brough’s Imbroglio. If the mousy protagonist is on a dagger tile, then the dagger can stab enemies. That’s the game’s first key proposition: position is everything.

Movement is the other proposition. By swiping in any of the four cardinal directions, every figure on the board that can move, will move in that direction with a few minor exceptions. (The game credits Threes! for this mechanic). The figures that don’t move will use an item on their space, if possible. That means you, of course, but all of the automatons standing in your way as well. It’s fiendish how often this mechanic is difficult to manipulate to a specific end. Early levels only have a few enemies, but the later ones have five, and they stay true to their automaton nature: when destroyed they come back often (though not always?). The game wants you to find an elegant solution and not just browbeat your robot foes into submission. On that note, it has an energy system, with each move costing one stamina and a hunk of cheese replenishing said stamina every third level. ‘Elegance’ forever means the fewest moves, prioritising repositioning effects over direct battle.

The full variety of items is a doozy. Quite a few of them are weapons, with various hit ranges, priority effects and other quirks. Some are for repositioning enemies or items. There are trap helmets, thieving masks and mirror items which actually want to provoke a fracas. Most difficult of all are the random or hidden effects, because although they are difficult to discern they must nevertheless be factored in. Each level feels like an elaborate multivariate deathtrap where one false swipe can mean your poor heroic mouse is stuck spending twenty turns or more getting out.

In this way the game is closer to the type of Solitaire you’d read about in Hoyle’s book of games and bust out a pack of Penguin cards to play. In solitaires of old, fail states abound. The state of play can get wretched very quickly. Maze Machina has quite a few combo effects and unusual timing structures, so it requires very clear-sighted forecasting and strategic planning. The difference between a good plan and a sloppy one is not numerical, it’s binary. You will fail, as I have, if you play haphazardly relying on a few favorite tricks or stacking combos to bail you out. Excellent play here means minding the boring elements every bit as much as the flashy ones.

Modern videogames have gamed human psychology by attaching numerical values to anything and everything: health, rarity, currency, even free time itself, are all conventionally made fungible by rendering them as numbers. Not so with Maze Machina, which cares about effects more than numbers. A single hit destroys almost any object or entity, there are no additional unlocks or grind and the whole game is available to play without extra investment or progression.

It’s refreshing and hardcore, and to this reviewer the most fun game to fail at repeatedly. Normally I’d bounce off a game after having so little success, but I can clearly see what it wants from me: deliberate, total consideration of every possibility. My normal pattern is just to brutally find the cleanest, best path from A to B but that approach is such a bad fit for Maze Machina.

It has quite a few play modes, so to relax and practice my technique I switch from the standard mode to Limit, which puts a hard cap of 250 turns. Draft is also a refreshing twist, giving a choice between new rules which take effect every few floors. The mechanical theme is present in the art, animations, sound effects and music throughout. It’s cohesive and slick. There is a richness, both in the number of ways to play and artistic vision that… enriches the play experience. The automaton theme also emphasis how heavily turns revolve around programmed series of actions, like a Rube Goldberg Machine.

I must again reiterate how bad I am at this game. I can recognise good plays with 100% benefit of hindsight, and occasionally even set them up in advance, but I cannot for the life of me get to that mythical fifteenth level. This is fine! Great, even! I’m shocked that none of my previous puzzle experience is proving very useful, and grateful for the chance to learn a new system from scratch. I do suspect some of the variance can genuinely ruin a run, but without a more perfect understanding I’d be rightfully accused of sour grapes (a.k.a. mad because bad). I hate this game! I can’t escape it!  5/5 would embark on this embarrassing, compelling learning spree again.

By Mikey Campbell
Wednesday, January 22, 2020, 06:56 pm PT (09:56 pm ET)

Presaging what will be the final nail in the coffin for Adobe Flash on Safari, Apple on Wednesday disabled support for the much-maligned multimedia plug-in in the latest version of Safari Technology Preview.

Apple quietly announced the imminent demise of Flash on Safari in a set of release notes accompanying Safari Technology Preview 99. Along with a number of enhancements to WebKit code and assets is mention of a single deprecation under “Legacy Plug-Ins,” which simply states, “Removed support for Adobe Flash.”

CNET was first to note the change on Wednesday.

Introduced as a developer-focused experimental browser in 2016, Safari Technology Preview provides an early look at upcoming Web technologies that will appear — or in the case of Flash, won’t appear — in both iOS and macOS. The browser is in many ways a standalone beta version of Safari.

The death of Flash is a long time coming. A once-pervasive standard for distributing rich media over the internet, the asset-hungry, proprietary software is now viewed as out-of-date and unsuitable for a mobile-first world. Late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said as much some 10 years ago in a widely circulated letter appropriately titled “Thoughts on Flash.”

Following increased competition and pushback from the likes of Apple, Google and other browser makers, Adobe in 2017 said it would pull the plug on Flash in 2020. Now, with five words, Apple is signaling that time is nigh for Safari.

For iOS device users, the end of Flash is a non-issue as the platform never integrated the web standard. Safari on Mac has shipped with Flash disabled since macOS Sierra, leaving users to manually activate the software on a case-by-case basis.

You don’t need an internet connection to have an easily searchable and extendable dictionary on your Fedora computer. You can use sdcv (StarDict under Console Version) and the public Stardict files on the default repositories to keep a local record for offline use. This article shows you how.

What is sdcv?

sdcv is a command line variant of Stardict. Stardict is a part of a long legacy of GUI offline dictionaries. The “dic” files it uses are formatted as a colon delimited file, with the word in first column and the definition in the second column. You can have multiple lines with the same word and different definitions. sdcv will provide you with a search function and formatted display of your results.

Installing sdcv

You can get started quickly with sdcv and the English dictionary by installing them from the default repos:

sudo dnf install sdcv stardict-dic-en

sdcv will be ready for use right away. If you want to see what other languages are available, use this command:

dnf search stardict

How to use sdcv

sdcv has an interactive and non-interactive mode. You can perform a quick search on a word or term using this command:

sdcv word

For example, you could search sdcv linux. Alternately, you can run sdcv by itself to activate interactive mode.

Customizing sdcv

sdcv has a –color option that adds coloring to the words and source of the definition. You can also use an alias to enable –color by default. Simply edit your shell resource file (default on Fedora is ~/.bashrc) to add this command:

alias sdcv="sdcv --color"

You can also use a more friendly name like this:

alias describe="sdcv --color"

sdcv references /usr/share/stardic/dic by default, or it uses the path located in the shell variable STARDICT_DATA_DIR. You can also set up a personal dictionary in the file $HOME/.stardict/dic.

Fun facts

Believe it or not, the dict network protocol is still alive to this day. You can use it with the curl command by using a command like this to search for a word:

curl dict://dict.org/d:<word>

This pull definitions straight from the internet via your command line. Enjoy using sdcv!

Photo by Pisit Heng on Unsplash.

Lydia is a powerful game. It’s the kind of experience that, while very short, will make you stop and think about its story long after the end credits roll. It’s tense, funny, and heartbreaking all in one go, and with the option to purchase additional DLC in support of the Finnish A-Clinic Foundation, its underlying message will undoubtedly resonate with many people.

You play as the titular Lydia, a child with a highly active imagination trapped in a neglectful home environment. After her father tells her a story of monsters in the night, Lydia becomes convinced that monsters are real, and with the help of her beloved teddy, ventures into her wardrobe to confront her fears. To say more of the story would ultimately ruin it, but needless to say that a lot of what you see within the game is not always as it seems.

For the most part, Lydia plays out like your typical adventure title; you can directly control Lydia for large portions of the game, investigating areas of interest and talking to people within the environment. Other scenes play out more like a visual novel, occasionally providing you with dialogue choices as you progress through conversations. Disappointingly, we found on a second playthrough that many of the choices presented to you actually make very little impact to the overall plot, and this is particularly noteworthy in the final scene of the game.

What’s immediately striking with the game is the one-two punch of the visuals and sound design. It looks like an abstract graphic novel, and its black and white colour palette is very much reminiscent of Limbo, but with occasional streaks of vibrant colour dotted throughout to denote areas of danger or safety. The soundtrack consists of a mixture of sinister ambient music and emotional melodies, and the characters speak in a nonsensical tongue that somehow fits quite naturally in the overall experience.

With only 4 short chapters to play through, Lydia will only take you about 1 or 2 hours to complete, so those after more of a meaty experience might want to look elsewhere. We would, however, encourage you to experience it at least once, if only for its eye-opening message. It successfully tells a haunting story about abuse and heartbreak without necessarily shoving it down your throat, and that’s really hard to do. It’s one of the most emotionally impactful games to grace the Switch since its launch nearly three years ago.

Open Liberty is a lightweight, production-ready Java runtime for containerizing and deploying microservices to the cloud, and is now available as part of a Red Hat Runtimes subscription. If you are a Red Hat Runtimes subscriber, you can write your Eclipse MicroProfile and Jakarta EE apps on Open Liberty and then run them in containers on Red Hat OpenShift, with commercial support from Red Hat and IBM.

Develop cloud-native Java microservices

Open Liberty is designed to provide a smooth developer experience with a one-second startup time, a low memory footprint, and our new dev mode:

Open Liberty provides a full implementation of MicroProfile 3 and Jakarta EE 8. MicroProfile is a collaborative project between multiple vendors (including Red Hat and IBM) and the Java community that aims to optimize enterprise Java for writing microservices. With a four-week release schedule, Liberty usually has the latest MicroProfile release available soon after the spec is published.

Also, Open Liberty is supported in common developer tools, including VS Code, Eclipse, Maven, and Gradle. Server configuration (e.g., adding or removing a capability, or “feature,” to your app) is through an XML file. Open Liberty’s zero migration policy means that you can focus on what’s important (writing your app!) and not have to worry about APIs changing under you.

Deploy in containers to any cloud

When you’re ready to deploy your app, you can just containerize it and deploy it to OpenShift. The zero migration principle means that new versions of Open Liberty features will not break your app, and you can control which version of the feature your app uses.

Monitoring live microservices is enabled by MicroProfile Metrics, Health, and OpenTracing, which add observability to your apps. The emitted metrics from your apps and from the Open Liberty runtime can be consolidated using Prometheus and presented in Grafana.

Learn with the Open Liberty developer guides

Our Open Liberty developer guides are available with runnable code and explanations to help you learn how to write microservices with MicroProfile and Jakarta EE, and then to deploy them to Red Hat OpenShift.

Get started

To get started with Open Liberty, try the Packaging and deploying applications guide and the Deploying microservices to OpenShift guide.

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