Tech News - 2D Game Development

Popular Japanese animation studio Khara, announced on Friday that it will be moving to open source 3D software Blender as its primary 3D CG tool. Khara is a motion picture planning and production company and are currently working on “EVANGELION:3.0+1.0”, a film to be released in June 2020. Primarily, they will partially use Blender for ‘EVANGELION:3.0+1.0’ but will make the full switch once that project is finished. Khara is also helping the Blender Foundation by joining the Development Fund as a corporate member. Last month, Epic Games granted Blender $1.2 million in cash. Following Epic Games, Ubisoft also joined the Blender Development fund and adopted Blender as its main DCC tool. Why Khara opted for Blender? Khara had been using AutoDesk’s “3ds Max” as their primary tool for 3D CG so far. However, their project scale got bigger than what was possible with 3ds Max. 3ds Max is also quite expensive; according to Autodesk’s website, an annual fee for a single user is $2,396. Khara also had to reach out to small and medium-sized businesses for its projects. Another complaint was that Autodesk took time to release improvements to their proprietary software, which happens at a much faster rate in an open source software environment. They had also considered Maya as one of the alternatives, but dropped the idea as it resulted in duplication of work resource. Finally they switched to Blender, as it is open source and free. They were also intrigued by the new Blender 2.8 release which provided them with a 3D creation tool that worked like “paper and pencil”.  Blender’s Grease Pencil feature enables you to combine 2D and 3D worlds together right in the viewport. It comes with a new multi-frame edition mode with which you can change and edit several frames at the same time. It has a build modifier to animate the drawings similar to the Build modifier for 3D objects. “I feel the latest Blender 2.8 is intentionally ‘filling the gap’ with 3ds Max to make those users feel at home when coming to Blender. I think the learning curve should be no problem.”, told Mr. Takumi Shigyo, Project Studio Q Production Department. Khara founded “Project Studio Q, Inc.” in 2017, a company focusing mainly on the movie production and the training of Anime artists. Providing more information on their use of Blender, Hiroyasu Kobayashi, General Manager of Digital Dpt. and Director of Board of Khara, said in the announcement, “Preliminary testing has been done already. We are now at the stage to create some cuts actually with Blender as ‘on live testing’. However, not all the cuts can be done by Blender yet. But we think we can move out from our current stressful situation if we place Blender into our work flows. It has enough potential ‘to replace existing cuts’.” While Blender will be used for the bulk of the work, Khara does have a backup plan if there's anything Blender struggles with. Kobayashi added "There are currently some areas where Blender cannot take care of our needs, but we can solve it with the combination with Unity. Unity is usually enough to cover 3ds Max and Maya as well. Unity can be a bridge among environments." Khara is also speaking with their partner companies to use Blender together. Khara’s transition was well appreciated by people. https://twitter.com/docky/status/1162279830785646593 https://twitter.com/eoinoneillPDX/status/1154161101895950337 https://twitter.com/BesuBaru/status/1154015669110710273 Blender 2.80 released with a new UI interface, Eevee real-time renderer, grease pencil, and more Following Epic Games, Ubisoft joins Blender Development fund; adopts Blender as its main DCC tool Epic Games grants Blender $1.2 million in cash to improve the quality of their software development projects

Yesterday, the Unity team announced the release of Unity 2019.2. In this release, they have added more than 170 new features and enhancements for artists, designers, and programmers. They have updated ProBuilder, Shader Graph, 2D Animation, Burst Compiler, UI Elements, and many more. Major highlights for Unity 2019.2 ProBuilder 4.0 ships as verified with 2019.2. It is a unique hybrid of 3D modeling and level design tools, optimized for building simple geometry but capable of detailed editing and UV unwrapping as needed. Polybrush is now available via Package Manager as a Preview package. This versatile tool lets you sculpt complex shapes from any 3D model, position detail meshes, paint in custom lighting or coloring, and blend textures across meshes directly in the Editor. DSPGraph is the new audio rendering/mixing system, built on top of Unity’s C# Job System. It’s now available as a Preview package. They have improved on UI Elements, Unity’s new UI framework, which renders UI for graph-based tools such as Shader Graph, Visual Effect Graph, and Visual Scripting. To help you better organize your complex graphs, Unity has added subgraphs to Visual Effect Graph. You can share, combine, and reuse subgraphs for blocks and operators, and also embed complete VFX within VFX. There is an improvement in the integration between Visual Effect Graph and the High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), which pulls VFX Graph in by default, providing you with additional rendering features. With Shader Graph you can now use Color Modes to highlight nodes on your graph with colors based on various features or select your own colors to improve readability. This is especially useful in large graphs. The team has added swappable Sprites functionality to the 2D Animation tool. With this new feature, you can change a GameObject’s rendered Sprites while reusing the same skeleton rig and animation clips. This lets you quickly create multiple characters using different Sprite Libraries or customize parts of them with Sprite Resolvers. With this release Burst Compiler 1.1 includes several improvements to JIT compilation time and some C# improvements. Additionally, the Visual Studio Code and JetBrains Rider integrations are available as packages. Mobile developers will benefit from improved OpenGL support, as the team has added OpenGL multithreading support (iOS) to improve performance on low-end iOS devices that don’t support Metal. As with all releases, 2019.2 includes a large number of improvements and bug fixes. You can find the full list of features, improvements, and fixes in Unity 2019.2 Release Notes. How to use arrays, lists, and dictionaries in Unity for 3D game development OpenWrt 18.06.4 released with updated Linux kernel, security fixes Curl and the Linux kernel and much more! How to manage complex applications using Kubernetes-based Helm tool [Tutorial]

Yesterday, Ubisoft Animation Studio (UAS) announced that they will fund the development of Blender as a corporate Gold member through the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund. It has also been announced that Ubisoft will be adopting the open-source animation software Blender as their main digital content creation (DCC) tool. The exact funding amount has not been disclosed. Gold corporate members of the Blender development fund can have their prominent logo on blender.org dev fund page and have credit as Corporate Gold Member in blender.org and in official Blender foundation communication. The Gold corporate members also have a strong voice in approving projects for Blender. The Gold corporate members donate a minimum of EUR 30,000 as long as they remain a member. Pierrot Jacquet, Head of Production at UAS mentioned in the press release , “Blender was, for us, an obvious choice considering our big move: it is supported by a strong and engaged community, and is paired up with the vision carried by the Blender Foundation, making it one of the most rapidly evolving DCCs on the market.”  He also believes that since Blender is an open source project, it will allow Ubisoft to share some of their own developed tools with the community. “We love the idea that this mutual exchange between the foundation, the community, and our studio will benefit everyone in the end”, he adds. As part of their new workflow, Ubisoft is creating a development environment supported by open source and inner source solutions. The Blender software will replace Ubisoft’s in-house digital content creation tool and will be used to produce short content with the incubator. Later, the Blender software will also be used in Ubisoft’s upcoming shows in 2020. Per Jacquet, Blender 2.8 will be a “game-changer for the CGI industry”. Blender 2.8 beta is already out, and its stable version is expected to be released in the coming days. Ubisoft was impressed with the growth of the internal Blender community as well as with the innovations expected in Blender 2.8. Blender 2.8 will have a revamped UX, Grease Pencil, EEVEE real-time rendering, new 3D viewport and UV editor tools to enhance users gaming experience. Ubisoft was thus convinced that this is the “right time to bring support to our artists and productions that would like to add Blender to their toolkit.” This news comes a week after Epic Games announced that it is awarding Blender Foundation $1.2 million in cash spanning three years, to accelerate the quality of their software development projects. With two big companies funding Blender, the future does look bright for them. The Blender 2.8 preview features is expected to have made both the companies step forward and support Blender, as both Epic and Ubisoft have announced their funding just days before the stable release of Blender 2.8. In addition to Epic and Ubisoft, corporate members include animation studio Tangent, Valve, Intel, Google, and Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ton Roosendaal, founder and chairman of Blender Foundation is surely a happy man when he says that “Good news keeps coming”. He added, “it’s such a miracle to witness the industry jumping on board with us! I’ve always admired Ubisoft, as one of the leading games and media producers in the world. I look forward to working with them and help them find their ways as a contributor to our open source projects on blender.org.” https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1153376866604113920 Users are very happy and feel that this is a big step forward for Blender. https://twitter.com/nazzagnl/status/1153339812105064449 https://twitter.com/Nahuel_Belich/status/1153302101142978560 https://twitter.com/DJ_Link/status/1153300555986550785 https://twitter.com/cgmastersnet/status/1153438318547406849 Many also see this move as the industry’s way of sidelining Autodesk, the company which is popularly used for its DCC tools. https://twitter.com/flarb/status/1153393732261072897 A Hacker News user comments, “Kudos to blender's marketing team. They get a bit of free money from this. But the true motive for Epic and Unisoft is likely an attempt to strong-arm Autodesk into providing better support and maintenance. Dissatisfaction with Autodesk, lack of care for their DCC tools has been growing for a very long time now, but studios also have a huge investment into these tools as part of their proprietary pipelines.  Expect Autodesk to kowtow soon and make sure that none of these companies will make the switch. If it means that Autodesk actually delivers bug fixes for the version the customer has instead of one or two releases down the road, it is a good outcome for the studios.” Visit the Ubisoft website for more details. CraftAssist: An open-source framework to enable interactive bots in Minecraft by Facebook researchers What to expect in Unreal Engine 4.23? Pluribus, an AI bot built by Facebook and CMU researchers, has beaten professionals at six-player no-limit Texas Hold ’Em Poker

Two days ago, researchers from Facebook AI Research published a paper titled “CraftAssist: A Framework for Dialogue-enabled Interactive Agents”. The authors of this research are Facebook AI research engineers Jonathan Gray and Kavya Srinet, Facebook AI research scientist C. Lawrence Zitnick and Arthur Szlam and Yacine Jernite, Haonan Yu, Zhuoyuan Chen, Demi Guo and Siddharth Goyal. The paper describes the implementation of an assistant bot called CraftAssist which appears and interacts like another player, in the open sandbox game of Minecraft. The framework enables players to interact with the bot via in-game chat through various implemented tools and platforms. The players can also record these interactions through an in-game chat. The main aim of the bot is to be a useful and entertaining assistant to all the tasks listed and evaluated by the human players. Image Source: CraftAssist paper For motivating the wider AI research community to use the CraftAssist platform in their own experiments, Facebook researchers have open-sourced the framework, the baseline assistant, data and the models. The released data includes the functions which was used to build the 2,586 houses in Minecraft, the labeling data of the walls, roofs, etc. of the houses, human rephrasing of fixed commands, and the conversion of natural language commands to bot interpretable logical forms. The technology that allows the recording of human and bot interaction on a Minecraft server has also been released so that researcher will be able to independently collect data. Why is the Minecraft protocol used? Minecraft is a popular multiplayer volumetric pixel (voxel) 3D game based on building and crafting which allows multiplayer servers and players to collaborate and build, survive or compete with each other. It operates through a client and server architecture. The CraftAssist bot acts as a client and communicates with the Minecraft server using the Minecraft network protocol. The Minecraft protocol allows the bot to connect to any Minecraft server without the need for installing server-side mods. This lets the bot to easily join a multiplayer server along with human players or other bots. It also lets the bot to join an alternative server which implements the server-side component of the Minecraft network protocol. The CraftAssist bot uses a 3rd-party open source Cuberite server. It is a fast and extensible game server used for Minecraft. Read More: Introducing Minecraft Earth, Minecraft’s AR-based game for Android and iOS users How does the CraftAssist function? The block diagram below demonstrates how the bot interacts with incoming in-game chats and reaches the desired target. Image Source: CraftAssist paper Firstly, the incoming text is transformed into a logical form called the action dictionary. The action dictionary is then translated by a dialogue object which interacts with the memory module of the bot. This produces an action or a chat response to the user. The bot’s memory uses a relational database which is structured to recognize the relation between stored items of information. The major advantage of this type of memory is the easy to convert semantic parser, which is converted into a fully specified tasks. The bot responds to higher-level actions, called Tasks. Tasks are an interruptible process which follows a clear objective of step by step actions. It can adjust to long pauses between steps and can also push other Tasks onto a stack, like the way functions can call other functions in a standard programming language. Move, Build and Destroy are few of the many basic Tasks assigned to the bot. The The Dialogue Manager checks for illegal or profane words, then queries the semantic parser. The semantic parser takes the chat as input and produces an action dictionary. The action dictionary indicates that the text is a command given by a human and then specifies the high-level action to be performed by the bot. Once the task is created and pushed onto the Task stack, it is the responsibility of the command task ‘Move’ to compare the bot’s current location to the target location. This will make the bot to undertake a sequence of low-level step movements to reach the target. The core of the bot’s understanding of natural language depends on a neural semantic parser called the Text-toAction-Dictionary (TTAD) model. This model receives the incoming command/chat and then classifies it into an action dictionary which is interpreted by the Dialogue Object. The CraftAssist framework thus enables the bots in Minecraft to interact and play with players by understanding human interactions, using the implemented tools. The researchers hope that since the dataset of CraftAssist is now open-sourced, more developers will be empowered to contribute to this framework by assisting or training the bots, which might lead to the bots learning from human dialogue interactions, in the future. Developers have found the CraftAssist framework interesting. https://twitter.com/zehavoc/status/1151944917859688448 A user on Hacker News comments, “Wow, this is some amazing stuff! Congratulations!” Check out the paper CraftAssist: A Framework for Dialogue-enabled Interactive Agents for more details. Epic Games grants Blender $1.2 million in cash to improve the quality of their software development projects What to expect in Unreal Engine 4.23? A study confirms that pre-bunk game reduces susceptibility to disinformation and increases resistance to fake news

Yesterday, Epic Games announced that it is awarding Blender Foundation $1.2 million in cash spanning three years, to accelerate the quality of their software development projects. Blender is a free and open-source 3D creation suite which supports a full range of tools to empower artists to create 3D graphics, animation, special effects or games. Ton Roosendaal, founder, and chairman of Blender Foundation thanked Epic Games in a statement. He said “Thanks to the grant we will make a significant investment in our project organization to improve on-boarding, coordination and best practices for code quality. As a result, we expect more contributors from the industry to join our projects.” https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1150793424536313862 The $1.2 million grant from Epic is part of their $100 million MegaGrants program which was announced this year in March. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games had announced that Epic will be offering $100 million in grants to game developers to boost the growth of the gaming industry by supporting enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators, and tool developers doing excellent work with Unreal Engine or enhancing open-source capabilities for the 3D graphics community. Sweeney believes that open tools, libraries, and platforms are critical to the future of the digital content ecosystem. “Blender is an enduring resource within the artistic community, and we aim to ensure its advancement to the benefit of all creators”, he adds. This is the biggest award announced by Epic so far. Blender has no obligation to use or promote Epic Games’ storefront or engine considering this is a pure generous offer by Epic Games with “no strings attached”. In April, Magic Leap revealed that the company will provide 500 Magic Leap One Creator Edition spatial computing devices for giveaway as part of Epic MegaGrants program. Blender users are appreciative of the support and generosity of Epic Games. https://twitter.com/JeannotLandry/status/1150812155412963328 https://twitter.com/DomAnt2/status/1150798726379839488 A Redditor comments, “There's a reason Epic as a company has an extremely positive reputation with people in the industry. They've been doing this kind of thing for years, and a huge amount of money they're making from Fortnite is planned to be turned into grants as well.  Say what you want about them, they are without question the top company in gaming when it comes to actually using their profits to immediately reinvest/donate to the gaming industry itself. It doesn't hurt that every company who works with them consistently says that they're possibly the very best company in gaming to work with.” A comment on Hacker News read, “Epic are doing a great job improving fairness in the gaming industry, and the economic conditions for developers. I'm looking forward to their Epic Store opening up to more (high quality) Indie games.” In 2015, Epic had launched Unreal Dev Grants offering a pool of $5 million to independent developers with interesting projects in Unreal Engine 4 to fund the development of their projects. In December 2018, Epic had also launched an Epic game store where developers will get 88% of the earned revenue. The large sum donation of Epic to Blender holds more value considering the highly anticipated release of Blender 2.8 is around the corner. Though its release candidate is already out, users are quite excited for its stable release. Blender 2.8 will have new 3D viewport and UV editor tools to enhance users gaming experience. With Blender aiming to increase its quality of projects, such grants from major game publishers will only help them get bigger. https://twitter.com/ddiakopoulos/status/1150826388229726209 A user on Hacker News comments, “Awesome. Blender is on the cusp of releasing a major UI overhaul (2.8) that will make it more accessible to newcomers (left-click is now the default!). I'm excited to see it getting some major support from the gaming industry as well as the film industry.” What to expect in Unreal Engine 4.23? Epic releases Unreal Engine 4.22, focuses on adding “photorealism in real-time environments” Blender celebrates its 25th birthday!

A few days ago, Epic released the first preview of Unreal Engine 4.23 for the developer community to check out its features and report back in case of any issues, before the final release. This version has new additions of Skin Weight Profiles, VR Scouting tools, New Pro Video Codecs and many updates on features like XR, animation, core, virtual production, gameplay and scripting, audio and more. The previous version, Unreal Engine 4.22 focused on adding photorealism in real-time environments. Some updates in Unreal Engine 4.23 XR Hololens 2 Native Support: With updates to the Stereo Panoramic Capture tool, it will be much easier to capture high-quality stereoscopic stills and videos of the virtual world in industry-standard formats, and to view those captures in an Oculus or GearVR headset. Stereo Panoramic capture Tool Improvements: This will make it easy to capture high-quality stereoscopic stills and videos of the virtual world in industry-standard formats. Animation Skin Weight Profiles: The new Skin Weight Profile system will enable users to override the original Skin Weights that are stored with a Skeletal Mesh. Animation Streaming: This is aimed at improving memory management for animation data. Sub Animation Graphs: New Sub Anim Graphs will allow dynamic switching of sub-sections of an Animation Graph, enabling multi-user-collaboration and memory savings for vaulted or unavailable items. Core Unreal Insights Tool: This will help developers to collect and analyze data about the Engine's behavior in a uniform fashion. This system has three components: The Trace System API will gather information from runtime systems in a consistent format and captures it for later processing. Multiple live sessions can contribute data at the same time. The Analysis API will process data from the Trace System API, and convert it into a form that the Unreal Insights tool can use. The Unreal Insights tool will provide an interactive visualization of data processed through the Analysis API, which will provide developers with a unified interface for stats, logs, and metrics from their application. Virtual production Remote Control over HTTP Extended LiveLink Plugin New VR Scouting tools New Pro Video Codecs nDisplay: Warp and Blend for Curved Surfaces Virtual Camera Improvements Gameplay & Scripting UMG Widget Diffing: Expanded and improved Blueprint Diffing will now support Widget Blueprints as well as Actor and Animation Blueprints. Audio Open Sound Control: It will enable a native implementation of the Open Sound Control (OSC) standard in an Unreal Engine plugin. Wave Table Synthesis: The new monophonic Wavetable synthesizer leverages UE4’s built-in curve editor to author the time-domain wavetables, enabling a wide range of sound design capabilities can be driven by gameplay parameters. There are many more updates provided for the Editor, Niagara editor, Physics simulation, Rendering system and the Sequencer multi-track editor in Unreal Engine 4.23. The Unreal Engine team has notified users that the preview release is not fully quality tested, hence should be considered as unstable until the final release. Users are excited to try the latest version of Unreal Engine 4.23. https://twitter.com/ClicketyThe/status/1149070536762372096 https://twitter.com/cinedatabase/status/1149077027565309952 https://twitter.com/mygryphon/status/1149334005524750337 Visit the Unreal Engine page for more details. Unreal Engine 4.22 update: support added for Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing (DXR) Unreal Engine 4.20 released with focus on mobile and immersive (AR/VR/MR) devices What’s new in Unreal Engine 4.19?

Unity has announced a new learning platform for professionals and hobbyists to advance their Unity knowledge and skills within their industry. The Unity Learn Premium, builds upon the launch of the free Unity Learn platform. The Unity Learn, platform hosts hundreds of free projects and tutorials, including two new beginner projects. Users can search learning materials by topic, content type, and level of expertise. Tutorials comes with  how-to instructions, video clips, and code snippets, making it easier to switch between Unity Learn and the Unity Editor. The Unity Learn Premium service allows creators to get immediate answers, feedback, and guidance directly from experts with Learn Live, biweekly interactive sessions with Unity-certified instructors. Learners can also track progress on guided learning paths, work through shared challenges with peers, and access an exclusive library of resources updated every month with the latest Unity releases. The premium version will offer live access to Unity experts, and learning content across industries, including architecture, engineering, and construction, automotive, transportation, and manufacturing), media and entertainment, and gaming. The Unity Learn Premium announcement comes on the heels of the launch of the Unity Academic Alliance. With this membership program,  educators and institutions can incorporate Unity into their curriculum. Jessica Lindl, VP and Global Head of Education, Unity Technologies wrote to us in a statement, “Until now, there wasn’t a definitive learning resource for learning intermediate to advanced Unity skills, particularly for professionals in industries beyond gaming. The workplace of today and tomorrow is fast-paced and driven by innovation, meaning workers need to become lifelong learners, using new technologies to upskill and ultimately advance their careers. We hope that Unity Learn Premium will be the perfect tool for professionals to continue on this learning path.” She further wrote to us, "Through our work to enable the success of creators around the world, we discovered there is no definitive source for advancing from beginner to expert across all industries, which is why we're excited to launch the Unity Learn Platform. The workplace of today and tomorrow is fast-paced and driven by innovation, forcing professionals to constantly be reskilling and upskilling in order to succeed. We hope the Unity Learn Platform enables these professionals to excel in their respective industries." Unity Learn Premium will be available at no additional cost for Plus and Pro subscribers and offered as a standalone subscription for $15/month. You can access more information here. Related News Developers can now incorporate Unity features into native iOS and Android apps Unity Editor will now officially support Linux Obstacle Tower Environment 2.0: Unity announces Round 2 of its ‘Obstacle Tower Challenge’ to test AI game players.

Epic games released a new version of it’s flagship game engine, Unreal Engine 4.22. This release comes with a total of 174 improvements, focused on “pushing the boundaries of photorealism in real-time environments”. It also comes with improved build times, up to 3x faster, and new features such as real-time ray tracing. Unreal Engine 4.22 also adds support for Microsoft HoloLens remote streaming and Visual Studio 2019. What’s new in Unreal Engine 4.22? Real-Time Ray Tracing and Path Tracing (Early Access): The Ray Tracing features, first introduced in a preview in mid-february,  are composed of a series of ray tracing shaders and ray tracing effects. They help in achieving natural realistic looking lighting effects in real-time. The Path Tracer includes a full global illumination path for indirect lighting that creates ground truth reference renders right inside of the engine. This improves workflow content in a scene without needing to export to a third-party offline path tracer for comparison. New Mesh drawing pipeline: The new pipeline for Mesh drawing results in faster caching of information for static scene elements. Automatic instancing merges draw calls where possible, resulting in four to six time fewer lines of code. This change is a big one so backwards compatibility for Drawing Policies is not possible. Any Custom Drawing Policies will need to be rewritten as FMeshPassProcessors in the new architecture. Multi-user editing (Early Access): Simultaneous multi user editing allows multiple level designers and artists to connect multiple instances of Unreal Editor together to work collaboratively in a shared editing session. Faster C++ iterations: Unreal has licensed Molecular Matters' Live++ for all developers to use on their Unreal Engine projects, and integrated it as the new Live Coding feature. Developers can now make C++ code changes in their development environment and compile and patch it into a running editor or standalone game in a few seconds. UE 4.22 also optimizes UnrealBuildTool and UnrealHeaderTool, reducing build times and resulting in up to 3x faster iterations when making C++ code changes. Improved audio with TimeSynth (Early access): TimeSynth is a new audio component with features like sample accurate starting, stopping, and concatenation of audio clips. Also includes precise and synchronous audio event queuing. Enhanced Animation: Unreal Engine 4.22 comes with a new Animation Plugin which is based upon the Master-Pose Component system and adds blending and additive Animation States. It reduces the overall amount of animation work required for a crowd of actors. This release also features an Anim Budgeter tool to help developers set a fixed budget per platform (ms of work to perform on the gamethread). Improvements in the Virtual Production Pipeline: New Composure UI: Unreal’s built-in compositing tool Composure has an updated UI to achieve real time compositing capabilities to build images, video feeds, and CG elements directly within the Unreal Engine. OpenColorIO (OCIO) color profiles: Unreal Engine now supports the Open Color IO framework for transforming the color space of any Texture or Composure Element directly within the Unreal Engine. Hardware-accelerated video decoding (Experimental): On Windows platforms, UE 4.22 can use the GPU to speed up the processing of H.264 video streams to reduce the strain on the CPU when playing back video streams. New Media I/O Formats: UE 4.22 ships with new features for professional video I/O input formats and devices, including 4K UHD inputs for both AJA and Blackmagic and AJA Kona 5 devices. nDisplay improvements (Experimental): Several new features make the nDisplay multi-display rendering system more flexible, handling new kinds of hardware configurations and inputs. These were just a select few updates. To learn more about Unreal Engine 4.22 head on over to the Unreal Engine blog. Unreal Engine 4.22 update: support added for Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing (DXR) Unreal Engine 4.20 released with focus on mobile and immersive (AR/VR/MR) devices Implementing an AI in Unreal Engine 4 with AI Perception components [Tutorial]

Epic Games, an American video game and software development company, made a series of announcements, earlier this week. These include: Epic Game’s CEO, Tim Sweeney to offer $100 million in grants to game developers Stunning RTX-powered Ray-Tracing Demo named Troll Epic’s free Online Services launch for game developers Epic MegaGrants: $100 million funds to Game Developers Tim Sweeney, CEO, Epic Games Inc, announced earlier this week that he will be offering $100 million in grants to game developers to boost the growth of the gaming industry. Sweeney made the announcement during a presentation on Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). GDC is the world's largest professional game industry event that ended yesterday in San Francisco. Epic Games also created a $5 million fund for grants that have been disbursed over the last three years. Now Epic Games is off to build a new fund called Epic MegaGrants. These are “no-strings-attached” grants, meaning that they don’t consist of any contracts requiring game developers to do anything for Epic. All that game developers need to do is apply for the grants, create an innovative project, and if the Epic’s judges find it worthy, they’ll offer them the funds. “There are no commercial hooks back to Epic. You don’t have to commit to any deliverables. This is our way of sharing Fortnite’s unbelievable success with as many developers as we can”, said Sweeney. Troll: a Ray Tracing Unreal Engine 4 Demo Another eye-grabbing moment at GDC this year was a “visually stunning” ray tracing demo revealed by Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films called "Troll”. Troll was rendered in real time using Unreal Engine 4.22 ray tracing and camera effects. And powered by a NVIDIA’s single GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card.  Troll is visually inspired by Swedish painter and illustrator John Bauer, whose illustrations are famous for Swedish folklore and fairy tales anthology known as ‘Among Gnomes and Trolls’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjt_MqEOcGM                                                            Troll “Ray tracing is more than just reflections — it’s about all the subtle lighting interactions needed to create a natural, beautiful image. Ray tracing adds these subtle lighting effects throughout the scene, making everything look more real and natural,” said Nick Penwarden, Director of Engineering for Unreal Engine at Epic Games. NVIDIA team states in a blog post that Epic Games has been working to integrate RTX-accelerated ray tracing into its popular Unreal Engine 4. In fact, Unreal Engine 4.22 will have the support for new Microsoft DXR API for real-time ray tracing. Epic’s free online services launch for game developers Epic Games also announced the launch of free tools and services, part of the Epic Online Services, which was announced in December 2018. The SDK is available via the new developer portal for immediate download and use. SDK currently supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. Moreover, the SDK, as a part of the release, provides support for two free services, namely, game analytics and player ticketing. Game analytics help developers understand player behavior. It features DAU (Daily active users), MAU (Monthly active users), retention, new player counts, game launch counts, online user count, and more. The ticketing system connects players directly with developers and allows them to report bugs or other problems. These two services will continue to evolve along with the rest of Epic Online Services (EOS) to offer infrastructure and tools required by the developers to launch, operate, and scale the high-quality online games. Epic games will also be offering additional free services throughout 2019, including player data storage, player reports, leaderboards & stats, player identity, player inventory, matchmaking etc. “We are committed to developing EOS with features that can be used with any engine, any store and that can support any major platform...these services will allow developers to deliver cross-platform gameplay experiences that enable players to enjoy games no matter what platform they play on”, states the Epic Games team. Fortnite server suffered a minor outage, Epic Games was quick to address the issue Epic games CEO calls Google “irresponsible” for disclosing the security flaw in Fortnite Android installer Fortnite creator Epic games launch Epic games store where developers get 88% of revenue earned

On 13 March, Wednesday, the Godot developers announced the release of a new version of the open source 2D and 3D cross-platform compatible game engine, Godot 3.1. This new version includes the much-requested improvements to the major release, Godot 3.0. Improved features in the Godot 3.1 OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer Rendering is done entirely on sRGB color space (the GLES3 renderer uses linear color space). This is much more efficient and compatible, but it means that HDR will not be supported. Some advanced PBR features such as subsurface scattering are not supported. Unsupported features will not be visible when editing materials. Some shader features will not work and throw an error when used. Also, some post-processing effects are not present either. Unsupported features will not be visible when editing environments. GPU-based Particles will not work as there is no transform feedback support. Users can use the new CPUParticles node instead. Optional typing in GDScript This has been one of the most requested Godot features from day one. GDScript allows to write code in a quick way within a controlled environment. The code editor will now show which lines are safe with a slight highlight of the line number. This will be vital in the future to optimize small pieces of code which may require more performance. Revamped Inspector The Godot inspector has been rewritten from scratch. It includes features such as proper vector field editing, sub-inspectors for resource editing, better custom visual editors for many types of objects, very comfortable to use spin-slider controls, better array and dictionary editing and many more features. Kinematicbody2d (and 3d) improvements Kinematic bodies are among Godot's most useful nodes. They allow creating very game-like character motion with little effort. For Godot 3.1 they have been considerably improved with: Support for snapping the body to the floor. Support for RayCast shapes in kinematic bodies. Support for synchronizing kinematic movement to physics, avoiding a one-frame delay. New Axis Handling system Godot 3.1 uses the novel concept of "action strength". This approach allows using actions for all use cases and it makes it very easy to create in-game customizable mappings and customization screens. Visual Shader Editor This was a pending feature to re-implement in Godot 3.0, but it couldn't be done in time back then. The new version has new features such as PBR outputs, port previews, and easier to use mapping to inputs. 2D Meshes Godot now supports 2D meshes, which can be used from code or converted from sprites to avoid drawing large transparent areas. 2D Skeletons It is now possible to create 2D skeletons with the new Skeleton2D and Bone2D nodes. Additionally, Polygon2D vertices can be assigned bones and weight painted. Adding internal vertices for better deformation is also supported. Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) CSG tools have been added for fast level prototyping, allowing generic primitives and custom meshes to be combined via boolean operations to generate more complex shapes. They can also become colliders to test together with physics. CPU-based particle system Godot 3.0 integrated a GPU-based particle system, which allows emitting millions of particles at little performance cost. The developers added alternative CPUParticles and CPUParticles2D nodes that perform particle processing using the CPU (and draw using the MultiMesh API). These nodes open the window for adding features such as physics interaction, sub-emitters or manual emission, which are not possible using the GPU. More VCS-friendly The new 3.1 version includes some very requested enhancements such as: Folded properties are no longer saved in scenes. This avoids unnecessary history pollution. Non-modified properties are no longer saved. This reduces text files considerably and makes history even more readable. Improved C# support In Godot 3.1, C# projects can be exported to Linux, macOS, and Windows. Support for Android, iOS, and HTML5 will come soon. To know about other improvements in detail, visit the changelog or the official website. Microsoft announces Game stack with Xbox Live integration to Android and iOS OpenAI introduces Neural MMO, a multiagent game environment for reinforcement learning agents Google teases a game streaming service set for Game Developers Conference

Microsoft has good news for all the game developers out there. It launched a new initiative, called Microsoft Game Stack yesterday, which includes an amalgamation of different Microsoft tools and services into a single robust ecosystem to ‘empower game developers’. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a rookie indie developer or an AAA studio, this developer-focused platform will make the game development process ten times easier for you. The main goal of Game Stack is to help developers easily find different tools and services required for game development at one spot. These tools range from Azure, PlayFab, DirectX, Visual Studio, to  Xbox Live, App Center, and Havok. Cloud plays a major role in Game Stack and it makes use of Azure to fulfill this requirement. Source: Microsoft Azure is globally available in 54 regions will help scale its Project xCloud (a service that streams games to PCs, consoles, and mobile devices) to provide an uninterrupted gaming experience for players worldwide. Not to forget, companies like Rare, Ubisoft and Wizards of the Coast are already hosting multiplayer game servers and storing their player data on Azure. It is also capable of analyzing game telemetry, protecting games from DDOS attacks, and training AI. Moreover, Microsoft Game Stack is device agnostic which makes it really convenient for the gamers. Another great component of Game Stack is a backend service for operating and building new games, called PlayFab. PlayFab offers game development services, real-time analytics, and LiveOps capabilities to Game Stack. PlayFab is also device agnostic. It supports iOS, Android, PC, Web, Xbox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Switch and all the other major game engines such as Unity and Unreal. Microsoft has also released a preview for five new PlayFab services. Out of these five, one, called, PlayFab Matchmaking is open for public preview, while other four including PlayFab Party, PlayFab Insights, PlayFab PubSub, and PlayFab user-generated Content are in private preview. Game Stack also comes with Xbox Live, one of the most engaging and interactive gaming communities in the world. Xbox Live will be providing identity and community services in the Game Stack. Microsoft has also expanded the cross-platform capabilities of Xbox Live under Game Stack with a new SDK for iOS and Android devices. Mobile developers will be able to easily connect with some of the most highly engaged and passionate gamers on the planet using Xbox Live. Other benefits of the Xbox Live SDK includes more focus on building games and leveraging Microsoft‘s trusted identity network to offer support for log-in, privacy, online safety and child accounts. Apart from that, there are features like gamerscore, and “hero” stats, that help keep the gamers engaged. Also, components such as Visual Studio, Mixer, DirectX, Azure App Center, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Havok are all a part of Game Stack. For more information, check out the official Microsoft Game Stack blog post. Microsoft open sources the Windows Calculator code on GitHub Microsoft open sources ‘Accessibility Insights for Web’, a chrome extension to help web developers fix their accessibility issue Microsoft researchers introduce a new climate forecasting model and a public dataset to train these models

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest labour organization in the United States, published an open letter on Kotaku, a video game website and blog, last week. The letter urges the video game industry workers to unionize and voice their support for better treatment within the workplace. The letter is from secretary-treasurer Liz Shuler and this is the first time when AFL-CIO has made a public statement about unionizing game developers. Shuler talks about the struggles of game developers and the unfair treatment that they go through in terms of work conditions, job instability, and inadequate pay in the letter.  Shuler mentions that although U.S. video game sales reached $43 billion in 2018 ( which is 3.6 times larger than the film industry’s record-breaking box office) and is a “stunning accomplishment” for the game developers, they are still not getting the respect that they deserve.   “You’ve built new worlds, designed new challenges and ushered in a new era of entertainment. Now it’s time for industry bosses to start treating you with hard-earned dignity and respect”, writes Shuler. She mentions that game developers often work for outrageous hours in a stressful and toxic work condition, unable to ask for better due to the fear of losing their jobs. She gives an example of developers at Rockstar Games who shared their experiences of  “crunch time” (when the pressure to succeed is extreme) lasting months and sometimes even years to meet the unreal demands from management and deliver a game that made their bosses earn $725 million in its first three days. “They get rich. They get notoriety. They get to be crowned visionaries and regarded as pioneers. What do you get?”, writes Shuler. According to Shuler, this is a moment for change and change will come when developers come together as a strong union by using their “collective voice” to ask for a “fair share of wealth” that the game developers create every day. She writes that the CEOs and the bosses would treat the developers right only when they stand together and demand it. “You have the power to demand a stake in your industry and a say in your economic future. Whether we’re mainlining caffeine in Santa Monica, clearing tables in Chicago or mining coal in West Virginia, we deserve to collect nothing less than the full value of our work”, states Shuler. Public reaction to the news is mostly positive, with some people calling out for a better and stronger alternative than unions: https://twitter.com/kwertzy/status/1096471380357349376 https://twitter.com/getglitched/status/1096499209719685120 https://twitter.com/moesidegaming/status/1096666233011871744 https://twitter.com/legend500/status/1096571646805188608 https://twitter.com/turnageb/status/1096481116763107328 Check out the complete letter here. Open letter from Mozilla Foundation and other companies to Facebook urging transparency in political ads Google TVCs write an open letter to Google’s CEO; demands for equal benefits and treatment The cruelty of algorithms: Heartbreaking open letter criticizes tech companies for showing baby ads after stillbirth

Game publisher Activision-Blizzard announced that it will lay off 8% of its staff of 9,600 employees. This announcement was made during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday. A total of nearly 800 employees, that will be laid off will mostly belong to non-game development and administrative areas of the company. CEO of Activision-Blizzard Bobby Kotick said, “The move is being made in an effort at de-prioritizing initiatives that are not meeting expectations and reducing certain non-development and administrative-related costs across the business." The company is undergoing restructuring because of missed expectations for 2018 and lowered expectations for 2019. It will boost up the numbers of employees in the development team of its franchises like Call of Duty and Diablo. In a note to its staff obtained by Kotaku, Blizzard, president J. Allen Brack said, “Currently staffing levels on some teams are out of proportion with our current release slate. This means we need to scale down some areas of our organization. I’m sorry to share that we will be parting ways with some of our colleagues in the U.S. today.” The letter also promised “a comprehensive severance package”, says Kotaku. It will include continued health benefits, career coaching, and job placement assistance as well as profit-sharing bonuses for the previous year to those who are being laid off at Blizzard. In the official press release on Blizzard's website, Brack said Blizzard is dedicated to bringing their unannounced projects to life. They will focus heavily on Esports and the Overwatch League, which is their biggest esports brand. Twitterati is highly disappointed with this news and is sympathetic towards dismissed employees. https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1095374774728048640 https://twitter.com/hitstreak/status/1095456359594610689 https://twitter.com/day9tv/status/1095390958584131584 Other organizations are also offering job opportunities to those in need. https://twitter.com/ScottLowe/status/1094052545297711104   https://twitter.com/MitchyD/status/1094061851804078082 Instacart changes its “tips stealing” policy after facing workers backlash Per the new GDC 2019 report, nearly 50% of game developers think game industry workers should unionize Tech Workers Coalition volunteers talk unionization and solidarity in Silicon Valley

Microsoft is reportedly planning to bring Xbox Live cross-platform gaming features to PC, Xbox, iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch. This news was first reported by Windows Central via a GDC 2019 schedule on Xbox Live. “Xbox Live is expanding from 400 million gaming devices and a reach to over 68 million active players to over 2 billion devices with the release of our new cross-platform XDK,” says the GDC listing. The GDC session will also offer a first look at the SDK to enable game developers to connect players between iOS, Android, and Switch in addition to Xbox and any game in the Microsoft Store on Windows PCs. Until now, Microsoft has reserved Xbox Live support on iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch platforms for its own games, but now, Microsoft is aiming to bring Xbox Live integration to even more gaming titles. This is a part of Microsoft’s gaming mission to bring software, services, and games to players on other platforms aside from its traditional PC and Xbox markets. Per Windows central, “Developers will be able to bake cross-platform Xbox Live achievements, social systems, and multiplayer, into games built for mobile devices and Nintendo Switch, as part of its division-wide effort to grow Xbox Live's user base.” For developers, this would mean allowing “communities to mingle more freely across platforms. Combined with PlayFab gaming services, this means less work for game developers and more time to focus on making games fun,” says the GDC listing. Microsoft is also building a xCloud game streaming service that will stream Xbox games to PCs, consoles, and mobile devices later this year. Twitter users are fairly excited about this news. https://twitter.com/Avers_G4GMedia/status/1091623967088144384 https://twitter.com/NintendoSwitchC/status/1092560268956233728 https://twitter.com/TannithArt/status/1092675726996844544 Microsoft announces Project xCloud, a new Xbox game streaming service. Epic games CEO calls Google “irresponsible” for disclosing the security flaw in Fortnite Android Microsoft plans to use Windows ML for Game development

Adding to the list of several fantasy consoles/computers is the newly-introduced SCRIPT-8, written by Gabriel Florit, a graphics reporter at the Washington Post who also likes working with augmented reality. https://twitter.com/gabrielflorit/status/986716413254610944 SCRIPT-8 is a JavaScript-based fantasy computer to make, play, and, share tiny retro-looking games. Based on Bret Victor’s Inventing on principle and Learnable programming, it provides programmers live-coding experience, which means the program’s output updates as they code. The games built using SCRIPT-8 are called cassettes. These cassettes are recorded at a URL which you can share with anyone and play with a keyboard or gamepad. You can also make your own version of an existing cassette by changing its code, art, or music, and record it to a different cassette. What are SCRIPT-8’s features? A code editor which provides you with immediate feedback. A slider using which you can easily update numbers without typing. A time-traveling tool for pausing and rewinding the game. You can see a character’s past and future paths with provided buttons. A sprite editor where the changes are reflected in the game instantly. A map editor to create new paths. A music editor using which you can create phrases, group them into chains, and turn those into songs. You can read more about SCRIPT-8 on its website. Google DeepMind’s AI AlphaStar beats StarCraft II pros TLO and MaNa; wins 10-1 against the gamers Fortnite server suffered a minor outage, Epic Games was quick to address the issue Deepmind’s AlphaZero shows unprecedented growth in AI, masters 3 different games