Dust3D is an open source 3D modeling application we first looked at back in April of 2018.  Since that time Dust has improved a great deal, including winning a Epic MegaGrant award.  Dust3D is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and is open source on GitHub under the MIT open source library.  Key features of Dust3D include:

Free and Open-Source

Yes, it’s free. And it’s cross-Platform, no matter you are on Windows, Linux, or MacOS, the same experience you’ll get.

The Easiest Game Asset Pipeline

With Dust3D, you’ll see yourself finish a game asset in a blink! Dust3D also supports export your model as FBX and glTF format, so that you can then import the files into softwares like Unreal Engine, Unity, and Godot for further development.

Start Modeling with Zero Experience

Believe it or not, you don’t need any experiences to make a 3D model with Dust3D, all you’ll need are good reference photos. There’re more videos on this.

You can learn more about Dust3D and see it in action in the video below.  You can download several example Dust3D projects here.

[embedded content]

GameDev News Art 3D Review

<!–

–>

Square Enix recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of the cult JRPG Nier’s launch on PS3 and Xbox 360 with an exciting livestream that detailed the series’ future. Not only was a remake of the original announced in the form of Nier Replicant (for PS4, Xbox One, and PC) but a mobile exclusive entry is also in the works.

Nier Reincarnation launches a closed beta across Android and iOS later this month, though it’s only open to people in Japan right now. There are 10,000 spots available for both platforms, and registrations are open until July 26. However, if the closed beta is oversubscribed, who gets to play is decided with a lottery draw. Sounds fair to us!

We don’t know that much about Nier Reincarnation just yet, but we’re able to surmise some details from the most recent trailer. Reincarnation seems to feature a young female protagonist, with a ghost-like companion, and in the trailer we see her wandering through expansive open locations, such as a stone city in the sky. The game also shows some party-based combat, and pretty fancy side-scrolling 2D sections.

It’s not a whole lot to go on, but you can check out the trailer below for more visual details on the game:

Aside from what we see in the trailer, we know Square Enix is producing while Applibot is tasked with development duties. Cydesignation is also working on character design, and we know that Reincarnation takes place in a new Nier location called ‘The Cage’.

Square Enix has launched an official website dedicated to the game in Japan, so you can bookmark that if you’re desperate to learn more. It’s pretty bare bones, but chances are it will receive regular updates as we head towards launch. If you’re the social media type, you can also follow the official Twitter and Facebook pages to receive updates directly.

If you need something Nier-ish to play in the mean time, be sure to check in with our list of the best mobile RPGs, and the best mobile MMORPGs.

Apple is supposedly on the verge of launching a new first-party app for Microsoft’s Windows 10, a move that could see the tech giant replace iTunes with standalone streaming apps.

Partners recognized for innovative solutions and making more possible for customers worldwide

REDMOND, Wash. — July 13, 2020 — Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced the winners and finalists of the 2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards. The annual awards recognize Microsoft partners demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology. Award winners and finalists from around the world will be recognized at the first-ever digital Microsoft Inspire, July 21-22, 2020.

This year, Microsoft acknowledged partners in 49 categories celebrating each of the solution areas, industries and sectors globally in which Microsoft technologies are used. Microsoft introduced ten new categories this year, including the first-ever Community Response Award, which recognizes partners that have made a great difference, providing innovative and unique services or solutions to help solve problems for our customers and community during these unprecedented times.

The finalists and winners for all Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards were selected from more than 3,300 nominations collected from more than 100 different countries worldwide based on their commitment to customers, their solution’s impact on the market and exemplary use of Microsoft technologies.

“It is an honor to recognize the winners and finalists of the Microsoft 2020 Partner of the Year Awards,” said Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft. “These partners go above and beyond, delivering timely solutions that solve the complex challenges that businesses around the world face — from communicating and collaborating virtually to helping customers realize their full potential with Azure cloud services, and beyond. I am proud to honor and congratulate each winner and finalist.”

Additional details on the Microsoft 2020 Partner of the Year Awards are available in a Microsoft Partner Network blog by Gavriella Schuster: https://blogs.partner.microsoft.com/mpn/congratulations-to-the-2020-microsoft-partner-of-the-year-awards-winners-and-finalists/.

The complete list of categories, winners and finalists, including the Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award winners for 2020, is available at https://aka.ms/POTYA_WinnersFinalist_List. For more information visit https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/inspire/awards.

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

About Microsoft Inspire

Microsoft Inspire provides Microsoft’s partner community with access to key marketing and business strategies, leadership, and information regarding specific customer solutions designed to help partners succeed in the marketplace. Microsoft Inspire provides partners with informative learning opportunities covering sales, marketing, services and technology. More information can be found at https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/inspire.

For more information, press only:

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts.

Ansible is a great automation tool for system and network engineers, with Ansible we can automate small network to a large scale enterprise network. I have been using Ansible to automate both Aruba, and Cisco switches from my Fedora powered laptops for a couple of years. This article covers the requirements and executing a couple of playbooks.

Configuring Ansible

If Ansible is not installed, it can be installed using the command below

$ sudo dnf -y install ansible

Once installed, create a folder in your home directory or a directory of your preference and copy the ansible configuration file. For this demonstration, I will be using the following.

$ mkdir -pv /home/$USER/network_automation

$ sudo cp -v /etc/ansible.cfg /home/$USER/network_automation

$ cd /home/$USER/network_automation

$ sudo chown $USER.$USER && chmod 0600 ansible.cfg

To prevent lengthy commands from failing, edit the ansible.cfg and append the following lines. We must add the persistent connection and set the desired time in seconds for the command_timeout as demonstrated below. A use case where this is useful is when you are performing backups of a network device that has a lengthy configuration.

$ vim ansible.cfg

[persistent_connection]

command_timeout = 300

connection_timeout = 30

Requirements

If SELinux is enabled, you will need to install SELinux binding, which is required when using the copy module.

# Install SELinux bindings

dnf -y install python3-libselinux python3-libsemanage

Creating the inventory

The inventory holds the names of the network assets, and grouping of the assets are in square brackets [], below is a  sample inventory.

[site_a]

Core_A ansible_host=192.168.122.200

Distro_A ansible_host=192.168.122.201

Distro_B ansible_host=192.168.122.202

Playbook

Read Operations

Let us create a simple playbook to run a show command to read the configuration on a few switches.

 
  1 ---

  2 - name: Basic Playbook

  3   hosts: site_a

  4   connection: local

  5 

  6   tasks:

  7   - name: Get Interface Brief

  8     ios_command:

  9       commands:

 10         - show ip interface brief | e una

 11     register: interfaces

 12 

 13   - name: Print results

 14     debug:

 15       msg: "{{ interfaces.stdout[0] }}
 

The above images show the differences without and with the debug module respectively.

Let’s break the playbook into three blocks, starting with lines 1 to 4.

• The three dashes/hyphens starts the YAML document
• The hosts defines the hosts or host groups, multiple groups are comma-separated
• Connection defines the methodology to connect to the network devices. Another option is network_cli (recommended method) and will be used later in this article. See IOS Platform Options for more details.

Lines 6 to 11 starts the tasks, we will be using ios_command and ios_config. This play will execute the show command show ip interface brief | e una and save the output from the command into the interfaces variable, with the register key.

Lines 13 to 15, by default, when you execute a show command you will not see the output, though this is not used during automation. It is very useful for debugging; therefore, the debug module was used.

The below video shows the execution of the playbook. There are a couple of ways you can execute the playbook.

• Passing arguments to the command line, for example, include -u <username> -k to prompt for the remote user credentials

 
ansible-playbook -i inventory show_demo.yaml -u admin -k
 

• Include the credentials in the host or group vars

 
ansible-playbook -i inventory show_demo.yaml
 

If we want to save the output to a file, we will use the copy module as shown in the playbook below. In addition to using the copy module, we will include the backup_dir variable to specify the directory path.

 
---

- name: Get System Infomation

  hosts: site_a

  connection: network_cli

  gather_facts: no

  

  vars:

    backup_dir: /home/eramirez/dev/ansible/fedora_magazine

  

  tasks:

  - name: get system interfaces

    ios_command:

      commands:

        - show ip int br | e una

    register: interface

    

  - name: Save result to disk

    copy:

      content: "{{ interface.stdout[0] }}"

      dest: "{{ backup_dir }}/{{ inventory_hostname }}.txt"
 

 
[site_a]

Core_A ansible_host=192.168.122.200

Distro_A ansible_host=192.168.122.201

Distro_B ansible_host=192.168.122.202

[all:vars]

ansible_connection=network_cli

ansible_network_os=ios

ansible_user=admin

ansible_password=fedora

ansible_become=yes

ansible_become_password=yes

ansible_become_method=enable
 

Write Operations

 
---

- name: Get System Infomation

  hosts: site_a

  connection: network_cli

  gather_facts: no

  

  vars:

    backup_dir: /home/eramirez/dev/ansible/fedora_magazine

  

  tasks:

  - name: Backup configs

    ios_config:

      backup: yes

      backup_options:

        filename: "{{ inventory_hostname }}_running_cfg.txt"

        dir_path: "{{ backup_dir }}"

    

  - name: get system interfaces

    ios_config:

      lines:

        - description Raspberry Pi

        - switchport mode access

        - switchport access vlan 100

        - spanning-tree portfast

        - logging event link-status

        - no shutdown

      parents: "{{ item }}"

    with_items:

      - interface FastEthernet1/12

      - interface FastEthernet1/13

      

  - name: Save switch configuration

    ios_config:

      save_when: modified
 

Before we execute the playbook, we will first validate the interface configuration. We will then run the playbook and confirm the changes as illustrated below.

Conclusion

This article is a basic introduction to whet your appetite that demonstrates how Ansible is used to manage network devices. Ansible is capable of automating a vast network, which includes MPLS routing and performing validation before executing the next task.

Sorry Monster Hunter fans, but the big-screen adaptation has reportedly been delayed until next year.

According to Deadline, Sony has decided to push back Screen Gems’ upcoming film starring Milla Jovovich from 4th September to 23rd April 2021. While no reason has been provided, it’s likely tied to the coronavirus pandemic and theatres potentially being required to close down for another month.

This obviously isn’t the first time a film has been delayed this year due to COVID-19. Some other major movies that have already been held back include Fast and Furious 9, 007’s latest outing No Time to Die, and Marvel’s Black Widow.

Paul W.S. Anderson – best-known for writing the Resident Evil film franchise (also starring Milla) – is both the director and writer of the new Capcom movie adaptation. Here’s a description of the film, courtesy of Screen Gems:

Behind our world, there is another: a world of dangerous and powerful monsters that rule their domain with deadly ferocity. When Lt. Artemis (Milla Jovovich) and her loyal soldiers are transported from our world to the new world, the unflappable lieutenant receives the shock of her life. In her desperate battle for survival against enormous enemies with incredible powers and unstoppable, revolting attacks, Artemis will team up with a mysterious man who has found a way to fight back.

Earlier this week, fans got their first look at Jovoich wielding the game’s famous Dual Blades. Milla told Empire how she went with this weapon because she was able to kill more monsters (in-game) and thought they’d look great on-screen:

“I experimented with different weapons during the game and was able to kill more monsters with those blades. I thought they’d look really beautiful in an action sequence.”

How do you feel about this news? Will you be heading to your local cinema to see this live-action adaptation of Monster Hunter when it does arrive? Tell us down below.