Thanks in part to a $50,000 award from the Mozilla foundation, the Godot game engine is gaining the ability to be run in a web browser.   You can try it out right here if you have the latest version of a Chrome based browser, or Firefox Nightly.

Explanation for the rationale for Godot in a Browser from the Godot news page:

Godot Engine supports exporting games to the HTML5 platform (i.e. browsers). Given that the editor itself is written using the Godot Engine API it should be possible to run the editor in browsers as well.

The reason why the editor wasn’t able to run in browsers up until now was due to some historical Web browsers limitations, mostly lack of support for threading, but also file system access.

With the introduction of WebAssembly, WebAssembly threads, Javascript SharedArrayBuffer, and possibly an upcoming Native FileSystem API, it should now be possible to have an almost-native user experience when running the editor on the Web.

This will be beneficial in many ways to the engine itself for multiple reasons:

1. It will lower the barrier for new users, which will be able to try out the engine without the need to download anything.
   
2. Any modification towards reaching that goal will also improve the HTML5 export itself (given that the editor is made like a Godot game).
   
3. It will allow to use Godot in a reasonable way in environments where installing/downloading applications is not an option (e.g. schools’ computers and tablets), fostering the usage of the engine for educational purposes (which is something we, as an open source community, deeply believe in).

This DOES NOT mean that Godot will move completely to the Web, nor that the Web browsers version will be the recommended way for professional development, but it will be an additional option for cases where it might be useful (again, pick the education sector as an example).

Perhaps the most interesting part is the future plans for mobile usage:

• Virtual keyboard in the HTML5 plaform, for working text input in mobile devices.
  
• Persistence support, WebDAV integration.
  
• Gestures for the editor, allowing using the editor from touch devices (this will also be beneficial to make native Android or iOS versions of the editor for example).

These features, as well as Dropbox support, could truly bring Godot to Android, iOS or ChromeOS devices in the future!  You can learn more about Godot in the Browser in this video.  This is the second project to bring Godot to the browser, details of the first ‘Godot.Online’ is available here.  Note, Godot.online is not an official Godot project.

GameDev News Godot HTML5

A new Dragon Quest game is in the works for iOS and Android. Square Enix revealed Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai – Tamashii no Kizuna during a live stream with Pokemon Masters creator Dena handling development duties. These game names are not getting any shorter.

Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai – Tamashii no Kizuna is due to release in Japan in 2021 on iOS and Android, but we don’t have a specific date just yet. There is also no word on a Western release date, either.

We got a quick glimpse of gameplay that shows Dai, Popp, and Maam dashing from fight-to-fight and engaging in three-lane battles. You can check more of the game out in the reveal trailer below. The dash RPG looks a tad like Pokemon Masters, at least where the fighting is concerned as that game also features three-on-three bouts. The main difference between the two is that you do your own fighting in Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai – Tamashii no Kizuna – obviously.

Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai – Tamashii no Kizuna – which means bonds of souls, in case you were wondering – was revealed alongside two other titles. Infinity Strash – Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai and Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai – Xross Blade will launch on consoles and arcade respectively.

All three of them are based on a manga called Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai which ran in a Japanese magazine called Shonen Jump.

If next year is a year too far, then we’ve got a list of the best mobile RPGs to keep you sane while you wait. We even have Dragon Quest VIII on there if you fancy sticking to the beloved series.

Daniel

I’m thrilled to announce that Blazor WebAssembly is now officially released. This is a fully-featured and supported release of Blazor WebAssembly that is ready for production use. Full stack web development with .NET is now here!

Get started

Getting started with Blazor WebAssembly is easy: simply go to https://blazor.net and install the latest .NET Core SDK (3.1.300 or later), which includes everything you need to build and run Blazor WebAssembly apps.

You can then create and run your first Blazor WebAssembly app by running:

dotnet new blazorwasm -o BlazorApp1
cd BlazorApp1
dotnet run

Browse to https://localhost:5001 and voilà! You’ve just built and run your first Blazor WebAssembly app!

To maximize your Blazor productivity, be sure to install a supported version of Visual Studio for your platform of choice:

You can find additional docs and samples on https://blazor.net.

Upgrade an existing project

If you already have an existing Blazor WebAssembly project, you can upgrade it from the 3.2.0 Release Candidate to the official 3.2.0 release by doing the following:

• Update all Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebAssembly.* and System.Net.Http.Json package references to version 3.2.0.

That’s it, you’re all set!

What is Blazor WebAssembly?

In case this is your first time learning about Blazor, let me introduce you to what Blazor WebAssembly is all about.

Blazor is an open source and cross-platform web UI framework for building single-page apps using .NET and C# instead of JavaScript. Blazor is based on a powerful and flexible component model for building rich interactive web UI. You implement Blazor UI components using a combination of .NET code and Razor syntax: an elegant melding of HTML and C#. Blazor components can seamlessly handle UI events, bind to user input, and efficiently render UI updates.

Blazor components can then be hosted in different ways to create your web app. The first supported way is called Blazor Server. In a Blazor Server app, the components run on the server using .NET Core. All UI interactions and updates are handled using a real-time WebSocket connection with the browser. Blazor Server apps are fast to load and simple to implement. Support for Blazor Server is available with .NET Core 3.1 LTS.

Blazor WebAssembly is now the second supported way to host your Blazor components: client-side in the browser using a WebAssembly-based .NET runtime. Blazor WebAssembly includes a proper .NET runtime implemented in WebAssembly, a standardized bytecode for the web. This .NET runtime is downloaded with your Blazor WebAssembly app and enables running normal .NET code directly in the browser. No plugins or code transpilation are required. Blazor WebAssembly works with all modern web browsers, both desktop and mobile. Similar to JavaScript, Blazor WebAssembly apps run securely on the user’s device from within the browser’s security sandbox. These apps can be deployed as completely standalone static sites without any .NET server component at all, or they can be paired with ASP.NET Core to enable full stack web development with .NET, where code can be effortlessly shared with the client and server.

Fully-featured

Blazor WebAssembly comes packed with features to keep you productive on your next web app project:

Blazor in action

Blazor WebAssembly has everything you need to build fully-featured production web apps. To see all these Blazor WebAssembly features in action, checkout Steve Sanderson’s on-demand BUILD session (link should be live after 12pm PT): Modern Web UI with Blazor WebAssembly.

Ready-made components

Of course, any web app is going to need beautiful and feature rich components. A variety of Blazor UI components are available from our fantastic partners that work great in any Blazor app, including Blazor WebAssembly apps:

Open-source community

Blazor also has a thriving open-source community and ecosystem. Members of the community, (folks just like you!) have built lots of great component libraries, interop libraries, test frameworks, and more, and then made them freely available for you to use. Some great examples include:

You can find these community projects and many others listed on the Awesome Blazor GitHub repo.

LTS or Current?

Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 is a fully supported release under the .NET Core Support Policy. Since this is the first release of Blazor WebAssembly, it is a Current release, not an LTS release; it does not the inherit LTS status of .NET Core 3.1. This means that once Blazor WebAssembly ships with .NET 5 later this year, you will need to upgrade to .NET 5 to stay in support. We expect Blazor in .NET 5 to be a highly compatible release.

What’s next?

Now that we have shipped Blazor WebAssembly, we are shifting our attention to .NET 5. Work has already started on making Blazor WebAssembly available with .NET 5, which we expect to complete for preview next month.

We also have a number of Blazor features and improvements that we are investigating for the .NET 5 & 6 wave. You can see the list of core deliverables that we are considering in the Blazor Roadmap for .NET 5 issue on GitHub. Please note that we consider this list to be highly aspirational. While we hope to deliver all of the improvements listed, there are still many unknown and plans will certainly change as we go. We also expect that there will be plenty of smaller improvements that we will deliver as well.

We are also continuing to collaborate with our friends on the Xamarin team on experimental support for building native UI using Blazor through the Mobile Blazor Bindings project. This includes some early efforts to explore building hybrid UI for native apps, which we hope to share more about soon.

Thank you

We sincerely appreciate all the enthusiastic support we have received from the Blazor community as we’ve worked to make the release a reality. The number of Blazor articles, blog posts, docs, sample apps, libraries, books, videos, presentations, workshops, courses, meetups, feature suggestions, and feedback issues that have been contributed by the community to the Blazor ecosystem even while it was still in preview has been truly outstanding. To everyone who helped make this release possible, thank you! We couldn’t have done it without you.

Try Blazor today

We hope you enjoy this release of Blazor WebAssembly. Give Blazor a try today by going to https://blazor.net. We look forward to seeing what you create with it.

As always, if you have any questions of feedback about Blazor please let us know by filing an issue on GitHub.

Apple has decided to temporarily close a number of its just-reopened Apple Store locations across the United States on Sunday, as a measure to protect its retail employees from looters taking advantage of the ongoing George Floyd protests.

Click Here!

In a previous article, you explored how to control the firewall at the command line in Fedora.

Now you are going to see how to see how add, remove, and list services, protocols and ports in order to block or allow them.

A short recap

First, it’s a good idea to check the status of your firewall, see if it’s running or not. You do this, as we previously learned, by using the state option (firewall-cmd ‐‐state).

The next step is to get the zone for the desired network interface. For example, I use a desktop that has two network interfaces: a physical interface (enp0s3), representing my actual network card and a virtual interface (virbr0) used by virtualization software like KVM. To see what zones are active, run firewall-cmd ‐‐get-active-zones.

Now that you know what zone you’re interested in, you can list the rules for the zone with firewall-cmd ‐‐info-zone=FedoraWorkstation.

Reading zone information

To display information for a particular zone, run firewall-cmd ‐‐zone=ZoneName ‐‐list-all, or simply display information for the default zone with:

[dan@localhost ~]$ firewall-cmd --list-all
FedoraWorkstation (active)
target: default
icmp-block-inversion: no
interfaces: enp0s3
sources:
services: dhcpv6-client mdns samba-client ssh
ports: 1025-65535/udp 1025-65535/tcp
protocols:
masquerade: no
forward-ports:
source-ports:
icmp-blocks:
rich rules:

Now, let’s explore the output. The first line is showing which zone the following information applies to and if that zone is currently in use.

The target : default simply tells us this is the default zone. This can be set or retrieved via the ‐‐set-default-zone=ZoneName and ‐‐get-default-zone.

icmp-block-inversion, indicates if ICMP requests are blocked. For example if the machine responds to ping requests from other machines on the network. The interfaces field shows all interfaces that adopt this zone.

Handling services, ports, and protocols

Now focus on the services, ports, and protocols rows. By default, the firewall will block all ports, services and protocols. Only the listed ones will be allowed.

You can see the allowed services are very basic client services in this case. For example, accessing a shared folder on the network (samba-client), to talk to a DNS server or connect to a machine via SSH (the ssh service). You can think of a service as a protocol in combination to a port, for instance the ssh service is using the SSH protocol and, by convention, port 22. By allowing the ssh service, what you’re really doing is allowing incoming connections that use the ssh protocol at default port 22.

Notice, services that have the client word in their name, as a rule of thumb, refer to outgoing connections, i.e. connections that you make with your IP as source going to the outside, as opposed to the SSH service, for example, that will accept incoming connections (listening to connection coming from outside at you).

You can look up services in the file /etc/services. For example if you wish to know what port and protocol these service uses:

[dan@localhost ~]$ cat /etc/services | grep ssh
ssh 22/tcp # The Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol
ssh 22/udp # The Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol

You can see SSH uses both TCP and UDP port 22. Also, if you wish to see all available services, just use firewall-cmd ‐‐get-services.

Opening a port

If you want to block a port, service, or protocol, all you have to do if make sure it’s not listed here. By extension, if you want to allow a service, you need add it to your list.

Let’s say you want to open the port 5000 for TCP connection. To do this, run:

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=FedorwaWorkstation --permanent --add-port=5000/tcp

Notice that you need to specify the zone for which the rule applies. When you add the rule, you also need to specify if it is a TCP or UDP port via as indicated above. The permanent parameter sets the rule to persist even after a system reboot.

Look at the information for your zone again:

[dan@localhost ~]$ firewall-cmd --list-all

FedoraWorkstation (active)

target: default

icmp-block-inversion: no

interfaces: enp0s3

sources:

services: dhcpv6-client mdns samba-client ssh

ports: 1025-65535/udp 1025-65535/tcp 5000/tcp

protocols:

masquerade: no

forward-ports:

source-ports:

icmp-blocks:

rich rules:

Similarly, if you wish to remove this port from the list, run:

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=FedorwaWorkstation --permanent --remove-port=5000/tcp

The very same remove (‐‐remove-protocol, ‐‐remove-service) and add (‐‐add-protocol, ‐‐add-service) options are also available for services and protocols.

Photo by T. Kaiser on Unsplash.

They might have taken a while to arrive, but the library of 29 SNES games available as part of Nintendo’s Switch Online subscription service adds considerable value to Switch’s online offering for many retro gaming fans. Throw in authentic-feeling wireless controllers that mimic the look and feel of the originals and you can almost imagine you’re back in the ’90s enjoying 16-bit classics like Super Mario World and F-Zero for the first time. Except you can now rewind and retry when you stuff up a difficult jump or explode mid-race, plus you can play them on the toilet without wheeling your telly into the bathroom.

But which Nintendo Switch Online SNES games are the very best? Well, at Nintendo Life we’ve ranked them ourselves, but it’s your turn to have a say. In a similar manner to our reader-ranked lists of the Top 50 3DS games, Game Boy games, Nintendo DS games and GameCube games, by rating your favourites below we can assemble a ranking of SNES games on Switch according to their User Ratings on on the site.

You can rate any (or every) game using the specially designed tool below. Simply scroll through the alphabetical list and click the star to score the relevant game with a rating of 1-10. All 29 SNES games currently available are listed, and you can find your favourites using the search box at the top of the list – type the first few letters and rate it directly from the results that pop up.

Remember, you’re assigning a score to the games, NOT ranking them from one to ten – we’ll take care of assembling the order and let you know the results soon. In the meantime, feel free to rate your favourites, and perhaps reacquaint yourselves with some 16-bit classics while you’re at it.

Thank you for rating your chosen games and helping to sort the good ‘uns from the not-so-good ‘uns. While we await the results, let us know your SNES favourites and give us your predictions for whether Super Mario World can trump Yoshi’s Island–or if either of them can possibly beat Link to the Past–as the NL readership’s numero uno.

Today, Nintendo has shared a statement regarding the anti-racism protests currently talking place across the US following the death of George Floyd on 25th May, 2020.

The full statement can be found below. Nintendo posted the message to its social media channels.

Nintendo’s rival platform holders, Microsoft and Sony, have also shared messages to social media over the past few days.

Information on Nintendo’s diversity and inclusion policy can be found on its official website.

Today we are talking about Heroic Lab’s Nakama.  Nakama is an open source (as well as hosted and managed) solution for the networking side of the game development side of game development.  In October of 2019, Heroic Labs became a premium sponsor of the Godot Game Engine. This week Heroic Labs announced they are now sponsoring the recently open sourced* Defold Game engine.

Details from the Heroic Labs blog:

Today we are pleased to announce that Heroic Labs has joined the Defold Foundation as their first corporate partner in order to further support and expand open-source tools within the game development community.

The Defold Foundation has been formed to maintain and grow the newly open-sourced Defold game engine which was originally created by one of the world’s leading interactive games companies, King Digital Entertainment, to power their incredibly popular titles.

This partnership with the Defold Foundation has enabled us to join forces to create an open-source client library that integrates Nakama and Defold tightly together to enable developers to take advantage of the full range of client APIs found within Nakama including authentication, matchmaking, leaderboards, multiplayer, realtime chat, and much more.

At Heroic Labs we are firm believers in open-source tools and software being the future of game development; with the steady increase in the popularity of gaming, specifically online and social play, developers need access to tools that enable them to move quickly and provide the most engaging experiences to their players regardless of platform without service lock-in.

You can learn more about the Nakama server here and browse the available open source solutions on GitHub.  Learn more about Heroic Labs and Nakama in the video below.  If you want to learn more about Nakama, unfortunately we do not have a tutorial on the subject, but Nathan at GDQuest does, check it out.

*source available, not technically open source as per OSI definitions.

GameDev News Defold Godot

Outfit 7 has announced the release date for the newest installment in the Talking Tom series, My Talking Tom Friends. It launches on June 12 on Android and iOS, with pre-registration open on Google Play right now. Over the years, Outfit 7 has cemented itself as the de facto developer and publisher of virtual mobile pet sims, with their suite of games receiving 12 billion downloads in the last alone decade.

My Talking Tom Friends is built upon Outfit 7’s success in those previous titles, advancing the formula by letting you care for all of Talking Tom’s characters at once under the same roof. The game takes place in a kind of domestic sandbox, as you cater to the needs of your cast of creatures.

It’s a little like The Sims – if all of your Sims somehow transformed into anthropomorphic animals and forgot how to look after themselves. Characters like Talking Tom, Ginger, Angela, Hank, Ben, and Becca are all present in the house, which you can also decorate and customise to your preference.

Below you can find one of the series shorts that makes Talking Tom and its characters so beloved:

When asked about the new installment in the series, senior game designer, Barbara Erman, said this:

“We wanted to give fans the perfect blend of caring for their favorite characters and having amazing experiences with them. And where the line between ‘you’ and ‘them’ disappears as you get drawn into the bright, vivid world of games, fun, and friendship.”

If Talking Tom sounds like your kind of game, then you can get your hands on the real thing on June 12. You can also currently pre-register on Google Play, though not for iOS just yet.