Yesterday we talked about Rider for Unreal Engine, but did you also know that Rider can be used to develop Godot games as well?

There are a few things you are going to need to get started.  First off obviously is JetBrain’s Rider, which is available with in a 30 day free trial.  However if you are a student or are an open source contributor there are free licenses available.

Next you are going to need to download and install the Godot plugin from the JetBrains plugin repository.  Simply click the blue Get button to download the required zip file.  By the way, there is also a community contributed GDScript plugin available here, but that is not what we will be covering today.

To install the plugin simply select File->Settings, locate the Plugins option on the left, then click the Gear icon and select Install Plugin from Disk…

Then select the just downloaded zip file.  This will now required a restart of the IDE.  You now have Godot support in Rider.

In Godot you do need to enable Mono debugging however.  This is available under Project->Project Settings, then on the left hand side locate Mono->Debugger Agent, then turn on Wait for Debugger.

You can see the entire process in action in the video below.  If you Rider isn’t your IDE of choice, perhaps you want to check out using Visual Studio Code with Godot instead.

GameDev News Applications Godot

And the winner of the most ridiculous video game title of all time goes to… Romancing Saga Reuniverse. Let’s all give it a big round of applause. It’s an upcoming brand new entry in the long-running JRPG series that rolls the clock right back to a time when pixels were cool.

It takes place in a world trapped in a cycle of destruction, with an apocalypse ending life every 300 years. This is all thanks to a group known as the Sinistrals, who As is ever the case with JRPGs, it’s your job to gather up a big party of heroic individuals and put a stop to the bad guys once and for all.

And you do that Gacha-style. This is a free-to-play RPG that features all of the usual trimmings: summoning heroes, automatic battles, and grinding for upgrade resources. It also shares a lot in common with its JRPG forebears though, with gorgeous hand-drawn character art, beautiful pixel visuals, and a bunch of roles and skills to unlock for each character.

It’s not the first entry in the series to arrive on mobile. Romancing Saga 2, 3, and Saga: Scarlet Grace, a port of the PlayStation Vita entry, are all available right now on the App Store or Google Play.

At this point, you’ve probably got a good idea about whether or not you want to play this. If you’re in the former camp, and can’t wait to check it out, you can pre-register right now on the App Store or Google Play. According to the App Store, Romancing Saga Reuniverse will launch on mobile on June 23.

This post is part 1 of a two-part series about how organizations use Azure Cosmos DB to meet real world needs and the difference it’s making to them. In part 1, we explore the challenges that led service developers for Minecraft Earth to choose Azure Cosmos DB and how they’re using it to capture almost every action taken by every player around the globe—with ultra-low latency. In part 2, we examine the solution’s workload and how Minecraft Earth service developers have benefited from building it on Azure Cosmos DB.

Extending the world of Minecraft into our real world

You’ve probably heard of the game Minecraft, even if you haven’t played it yourself. It’s the best-selling video game of all time, having sold more than 176 million copies since 2011. Today, Minecraft has more than 112 million monthly players, who can discover and collect raw materials, craft tools, and build structures or earthworks in the game’s immersive, procedurally generated 3D world. Depending on game mode, players can also fight computer-controlled foes and cooperate with—or compete against—other players.

In May 2019, Microsoft announced the upcoming release of Minecraft Earth, which began its worldwide rollout in December 2019. Unlike preceding games in the Minecraft franchise, Minecraft Earth takes things to an entirely new level by enabling players to experience the world of Minecraft within our real world through the power of augmented reality (AR).

For Minecraft Earth players, the experience is immediately familiar—albeit deeply integrated with the world around them. For developers on the Minecraft team at Microsoft, however, the delivery of Minecraft Earth—especially the authoritative backend services required to support the game—would require building something entirely new.

Nathan Sosnovske, a Senior Software Engineer on the Minecraft Earth services development team explains:

“With vanilla Minecraft, while you could host your own server, there was no centralized service authority. Minecraft Earth is based on a centralized, authoritative service—the first ‘heavy’ service we’ve ever had to build for the Minecraft franchise.”

In this case study, we’ll look at some of the challenges that Minecraft Earth service developers faced in delivering what was required of them—and how they used Azure Cosmos DB to meet those needs.

The technical challenge: Avoiding in-game lag

Within the Minecraft Earth client, which runs on iOS-based and Android-based AR-capable devices, almost every action a player takes results in a write to the core Minecraft Earth service. Each write is a REST POST that must be immediately accepted and acknowledged to avoid any noticeable in-game lag.

“From a services perspective, Minecraft Earth requires low-latency writes and medium-latency reads,” explains Sosnovske. “Writes need to be fast because the client requires confirmation on each one, such as might be needed for the client to render—for example, when a player taps on a resource to see what’s in it, we don’t want the visuals to hang while the corresponding REST request is processed. Medium-latency reads are acceptable because we can use client-side simulation until the backing model behind the service can be updated for reading.”

To complicate the challenge, Minecraft Earth service developers needed to ensure low-latency writes regardless of a player’s location. This required running copies of the service in multiple locations within each geography where Minecraft Earth would be offered, along with built-in intelligence to route the Minecraft Earth client to the nearest location where the service is deployed.

“Typical network latency between the east and west coasts of the US is 70 to 80 milliseconds,” says Sosnovske. “If a player in New York had to rely on a service running in San Francisco, or vice versa, the in-game lag would be unacceptable. At the same time, the game is called Minecraft Earth—meaning we need to enable players in San Francisco and New York to share the same in-game experience. To deliver all this, we need to replicate the service—and its data—in multiple, geographically distributed datacenters within each geography.”

The solution: An event sourcing pattern based on Azure Cosmos DB

To satisfy their technical requirements, Minecraft Earth service developers implemented an event sourcing pattern based on Azure Cosmos DB.

“We originally considered using Azure Table storage to store our append-only event log, but its lack of any SLAs for read and write latencies made that unfeasible,” says Sosnovske. “Ultimately, we chose Azure Cosmos DB because it provides 10 millisecond SLAs for both reads and writes, along with the global distribution and multi-master capabilities needed to replicate the service in multiple locations within each geography.”

With an event sourcing pattern, instead of just storing the current state of the data, the Minecraft Earth service uses an append-only data store that’s based on Azure Cosmos DB to record the full series of actions taken on the data—in this case, mapping to each in-game action taken by the player. After immediate acknowledgement of a successful write is returned to the client, queues that subscribe to the append-only event store handle postprocessing and asynchronously apply the collected events to a domain state maintained in Azure Blob storage. To optimize things further, Minecraft Earth developers combined the event sourcing pattern with domain-driven design, in which each app domain—such as inventory items, character profiles, or achievements—has its own event stream.

“We modeled our data as streams of events that are stored in an append-only log and mutate an in-memory model state, which is used to drive various client views,” says Sosnovske. “That cached state is maintained in Azure Blob storage, which is fast enough for reads and helps to keep our request unit costs for Azure Cosmos DB to a minimum. In many ways, what we’ve done with Azure Cosmos DB is like building a write cache that’s really, really resilient.”

The following diagram shows how the event sourcing pattern based on Azure Cosmos DB works:

Putting Azure Cosmos DB in place

In putting Azure Cosmos DB to use, developers had to make a few design decisions:

Azure Cosmos DB API. Developers chose to use the Azure Cosmos DB Core (SQL) API because it offered the best performance and the greatest ease of use, along with other needed capabilities.

“We were building a system from scratch, so there was no need for a compatibility layer to help us migrate existing code,” Sosnovske explains. “In addition, some Azure Cosmos DB features that we depend on—such as TransactionalBatch—are only supported with the Core (SQL) API. As an added advantage, the Core (SQL) API was really intuitive, as our team was already familiar with SQL in general.”

Read Introducing TransactionalBatch in the .NET SDK to learn more.

Partition key. Developers ultimately decided to logically partition the data within Azure Cosmos DB based on users.

“We originally partitioned data on users and domains—again, examples being inventory items or achievements—but found that this breakdown was too granular and prevented us from using database transactions within Azure Cosmos DB to their full potential,” says Sosnovske.”

Consistency level. Of the five consistency levels supported by Azure Cosmos DB, developers chose session consistency, which they combined with heavy etag checking to ensure that data is properly written.

“This works for us because of how we store data, which is modeled as an append-only log with a head document that serves as a pointer to the tail of the log,” explains Sosnovske. “Writing to the database involves reading the head document and its etag, deriving the N+1 log ID, and then constructing a transactional batch operation that overwrites the head pointer using the previously read etag and creates a new document for the log entry. In the unlikely case that the log has already been written, the etag check and the attempt to create a document that already existed will result in a failed transaction. This happened regardless of whether another request ‘beats’ us to writing or if our request reads slightly out-of-date data.”

In part 2 of this series, we examine the solution’s current workload and how Minecraft Earth service developers have benefited from building it on Azure Cosmos DB.

Get started with Azure Cosmos DB

Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. If you want to update to Fedora 32 on your Silverblue system, this article tells you how. It not only shows you what to do, but also how to revert back things if anything unforeseen happens.

Prior to actually doing the rebase to Fedora 32, it is recommended to perform any pending updates. This is accomplished by entering the following at the terminal

or installing updates through GNOME Software and following with a system reboot.

Rebasing using GNOME Software

The GNOME Software shows you that there is new version of Fedora available on the Updates screen.

First thing you need to do is to download the new image, so click on the Download button. This will take some time and after it’s done you will see that update is ready for install.

Click on the Install button. This step will take only a few moments and then you will be prompted to restart your computer.

Click on Restart button and you are done. After restart you will end up in new and shiny release of Fedora 32. Easy, isn’t it?

Rebasing using terminal

If you prefer to do everything in a terminal, than this next guide is for you.

Rebasing to Fedora 32 using terminal is easy. First, check if the 32 branch is available, which should be true now:

$ ostree remote refs fedora

You should see the following in the output:

fedora:fedora/32/x86_64/silverblue

Next, rebase your system to the Fedora 32 branch.

$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/32/x86_64/silverblue

Finally, the last thing to do is restart your computer and boot to Fedora 32.

How to revert things back

If anything bad happens — for instance, if you can’t boot to Fedora 32 at all — it’s easy to go back. Just pick the previous entry in GRUB, and your system will start in its previous state before switching to Fedora 32. To make this change permanent, use the following command:

$ rpm-ostree rollback

That’s it. Now you know how to rebase Silverblue to Fedora 32 and back. So why not do it today?

As part of the Star Wars celebrations earlier this week, TT Games gave fans a look at the key art of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. The company also shared some new screenshots and said there would be “nearly” 500 characters featured in the upcoming release, and that many of them would be playable.

One thing that wasn’t revealed was a release date. While we already know the game is due out at some point this year, we don’t know when exactly it will be arriving. According to a now-removed video on the official Star Wars YouTube page, it’s expected to launch on 20th October. So it’s still a while away if the date is correct.

When it is finally released, The Skywalker Saga will include content from all nine of the major Star Wars films – including the latest adventures from Rey, Finn, BB-8. and Kylo-Ren. Will you be trying out this LEGO Star Wars game on the Nintendo Switch whenever it does arrive? Leave a comment down below.

Hi there! Very new to this.
I would like to visit random people’s islands and leave a doodle or note on their bulletin board.
Can I do that? If so, how?
Should I open my DMs for the first time since the Zuckerberg hearing for the Dodo codes?? https://t.co/pQlm0ES1cM

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 7, 2020

This week at Bungie, Guardian Games nears the finish line. But before we dive into our weekly update, here’s a word from Luke Smith about a topic on many players’ mind these days: Eververse.

Rewards in Destiny 2 

Hey everyone,

This week’s update is going to look at some of the changes coming to Destiny 2’s rewards. As you know, rewards for your character come from a variety of places: Playlists where you find random folks to play with, aspirational activities like Raids, Trials, and Dungeons where you form up a Fireteam, and even Eververse, where you sling some Silver or Bright Dust back at us for items you want. However, in today’s Destiny 2, the balance of the game’s rewards is not where we want it to be. To be blunt, there isn’t enough pursuit out in the world. We’re going to fix it.

Let’s get to it.

All of this and more is planned for Destiny 2 Year 4: 

Vanity and Accessory (Ships, Ghosts & Sparrows) Changes 

We will be adding a Transmogrification feature to Destiny 2.

• This will allow players to turn their Armor into Universal Ornaments.
• We plan to allow players to do this with in-game effort OR Silver.
• This feature is in early development and is expected sometime during Year 4.

Each Season we will deliver an aspirational pursuit for armor. We haven’t done this consistently in Destiny 2.

• This armor will come from activities, not the Season Pass nor Eververse.
• As an example: We removed the Eververse Armor from Season 11 and itemized it into an aspirational activity, because this is the right thing to do for the game.

We are improving the rewards for Aspirational Activities (Raids, Trials, Dungeons)

• Going forward, Aspirational Activities will reward players with power, items, and vanity.
• When we build an Aspirational Activity it will have at least one accessory to pursue.
• The team is working on Adept Weapons for Trials of Osiris.
• Trials will get new Armor (aka not reprisal), accessories, and weapons in Season 13.
• Trials will get new Armor every year.
• Destiny’s next Raid will have brand new Armor, Weapons, and Exotic Accessories to pursue (no spoilers).

Beginning in Season 12, we will no longer be selling ships, ghost shells, sparrows, or armor ornaments in Eververse that are visually based on themes from Aspirational Activities.

• We are not planning on changing existing items as that is time we could be spending on itemizing the future.

Core Playlist Rewards changes (Strikes, Gambit, and Crucible)

We are adding a new set of Armor for the core playlists (Strikes, Gambit, and Crucible).

• This armor shares a set of new geometry, with decals and shaders specific to the activity.
• We will create new sets like this each Year (e.g., Year 4, Year 5, Year 6, etc.)
• This set will arrive alongside the next Expansion.

Starting in Season 12, we are adding a new Pursuit Weapon each Season.

• This weapon can be earned by playing your preferred Core playlist.
• This weapon will have activity-specific Legendary Skins that can be unlocked in each playlist.

We will no longer be selling new Legendary Weapon Ornaments in Eververse

Dust and Engrams.

We are making it easier for you to earn Bright Dust.

• We will be moving away from character-specific ways to earn Bright Dust and more toward Account-specific paths.
• This change is geared toward giving one-character players significantly more Bright Dust than they earn today.

We’re updating the Bright Engram to be more relevant than it is today.

• The earned Bright Engram in the Season Pass will be updated to include various Year 3 Eververse items previously sold for Silver and Bright Dust. And going forward, that Bright Engram will update each Season to include Eververse items from 3+ seasons prior.

On behalf of all of us at Bungie, we hope you and yours are safe and well. We know you could be doing anything with your free time, and so, so many of you are spending it in our worlds. Thanks, and stay safe.

See you soon,

-Luke Smith

And now back to your regularly scheduled TWAB!

Nearing the finish line

Look, you know it. I know it. Titans have taken a stand, owning the Guardian Games since Day 2 of the event. They’ve held strong against the book-reading Warlocks. They laugh in the face of fashion-centric Hunters like myself. After years of taking a backseat and avoiding the spotlight, Titans are showing off their Light brighter than they ever have before.

The more I think about this, the less surprised I am. Going into the event, I knew Titans would show up… maybe not to this extent, but Titans always have a way of being there when you need them. Day in and day out, Titans are standing strong in the face of darkness to protect the citizens of the Last City. Even if I was hoping for more Hunter wins, I can’t help but acknowledge the unrelenting strength here. Good stuff, Titans. You all deserve a bit more credit than folks give you.

We still have a few days left of this event, all contributing two points to daily standings. Warlocks, Hunters… these are your last chances to make a statement. Will you swap placements before the end of the games, or have you embraced your second and third place standings, respectively? Let’s see what you’ve got.

Now, let’s look at the rest of this week’s topics. Guardian’s Heart is coming to a close, and we have a final list of Bungie Bounty targets for you to hunt in support of charity, as well as a forecast of the final Iron Banner for this season.

Guardian’s Heart Update: Final Week

The Guardian’s Heart Charity Initiative has entered its final week. If you’ve been following along, we hit our $700,000 goal last week! Knowing this community, though, we aren’t even close to done yet. At the time of writing this article, you’ve already helped raise another $50k to help those impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We still have a slew of Bungie Bounties to place on the heads of our community in support of this charity event. Here’s who you’ll be looking for over the next few days:

Again, thank you to everyone who has donated thus far. I don’t think any of us could have imagined a pandemic like this in our lifetimes. To see Guardians coming together once again to support those in need warms our hearts. Thank you.

Iron Finale

Next week, Lord Saladin returns to the Tower, hosting the final Iron Banner of the season. If you dig 6v6 power-enabled combat, this is your time to shine. Saladin will bring his final round of weekly bounties, each of which rewarding pinnacle power gear. Let’s say you’ve been striking out on that final Heavy Weapon – Iron Banner may grant you the Rocket Launcher you need to finish your pinnacle journey for this season.

As this is the final Iron Banner of the season, this serves as last call for a few rewards.

Additionally, this will be your last chance to earn the Point of the Stag Pursuit Bow. This weapon will not be available during Season 11, so get in there and complete your quest! Who knows, maybe you’ll fall in love with a new Bowfriend.

Iron Banner and Bonus Valor will be available from 10 AM Pacific on May 12, running through 10 AM Pacific on May 19. 

Bug Bashers

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a thousand times more: The only good bug is a dead one. The Player Support team is vigilant, diving into as many #Help threads as they can each day to diagnose issues, distribute help articles, and find new issues in Destiny 2.

This is their report.

SMALL FIRETEAM XP BUFF

Fireteams who play together, stay together, which is why it’s important to reward them for their dedication. Earlier this week Bungie Help tweeted out an issue identified with the Season Pass Small Fireteam XP Buff:

An issue has been identified with a fix in progress where a small amount of the Season Pass Small Fireteam XP Boosts aren’t always applied to players appropriately. Regular XP Boosts aren’t impacted. Stay tuned to our This Week at Bungie blog post this week for more information.

We concluded that, in the worst case scenario, this issue is unlikely to have impacted players more than a single Season Pass rank. We expect to deploy a fix by patch 2.8.1.2 on May 19.

ERROR CODES

Destiny Player Support is investigating increases in connection-based error codes, including BEAVER, ANTEATER, and RABBIT, with priority set to NEWT and WATERCRESS errors.

As we continue to investigate solutions for players affected by persistent WATERCRESS errors, Destiny Player Support has set up an investigation timeline for players to track the progress of our internal investigations into the issue. This thread will continue to be updated with the latest information as it becomes available and until a solution is found.

KNOWN ISSUES

While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help Forum:

• The Doom Fang Pauldron exotic Titan gauntlets gain Super energy inconsistently on Void melee kills.
• The Warlord’s End perk on Felwinter’s Helm exotic Warlock helmet activates inconsistently with melee and Finisher kills.
• Performing a Finisher while wearing the Severance Enclosure exotic Titan chest piece will not count Finisher kills towards bounties.

For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, players can review our Known Issues article. Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

Friendly Competition

We’ve seen a few suggestions on how Guardian Games could have been scored, aside from Laurels and Medals. This week’s MOTW winner took a swing and what the event could look like with specific challenges and score by judges.

Movie of the Week:  The Guardian Games

Honorable Mention: The Gunslinger

The end of a TWAB usually means that we’re nearing the end of a Thursday… which leads to another weekend of Trials. While Trials is a predictable Friday offering, we’ve seen some feedback that things shouldn’t be too predictable.

This week’s Trials of Osiris map will be [Redacted]!

Have a good weekend, and we’ll see you again next week.

Cheers,

-Dmg04