Tech News - 2D Game Development

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

The makers of Citra, an emulator for the Nintendo 3DS, have released a new emulator called yuzu. This emulator is made for the Nintendo Switch, which is the 7th major video game console from Nintendo. The journey so far for yuzu Yuzu was initiated as an experimental setup by Citra’s lead developer bunnei after he saw that there were signs of the Switch’s operating system being based on the 3DS’s operating system. yuzu has the same core code as Citra and much of the same OS High-Level Emulation (HLE). The core emulation and memory management of yuzu are based on Citra, albeit modified to work with 64-bit addresses. It also has a loader for the Switch games and Unicorn integration for CPU emulation. Yuzu uses Reverse Engineering process to figure out how games work, and how the Switch GPU works. Switch’s GPU is more advanced than 3DS’ used in Citra and poses multiple challenges to reverse engineer it. However, the RE process of yuzu is essentially the same as Citra. Most of their RE and other development is being done in a trial-and-error manner. OS emulation The Switch’s OS is based Nintendo 3DS’s OS. So the developers used a large part of Citra’s OS HLE code for yuzu OS. The loader and file system service was reused from Citra and modified to support Switch game dump files. The Kernel OS threading, scheduling, and synchronization fixes for yuzu were also ported from Citra’s OS implementation. The save data functionality, which allowed games to read and write files to the save data directory was also taken from 3DS. Switchbrew helped them create libnx, a userland library to write homebrew apps for the Nintendo Switch. (Homebrew is a popular term used for applications that are created and executed on a video game console by hackers, programmers, developers, and consumers.) The Switch IPC (Inter-process communication) process is much more robust and complicated than the 3DS’s. Their system has different command modes, a typical IPC request response, and a Domain to efficiently conduct multiple service calls. Yuzu uses the Nvidia services to configure the video driver to get the graphics output. However, Nintendo re-purposed the Android graphics stack and used it in the Switch for rendering. And so yuzu developers had to implement this even to get homebrew applications to display graphics. The Next Steps Being at a nascent stage, yuzu still has a long way to go. The developers still have to add HID (user input support) such as support for all 9 controllers, rumble, LEDs, layouts etc. Currently, the Audio HLE is in progress, but they still have to implement audio playback. Audio playback, if implemented properly, would be a major breakthrough as most complicated games often hang or go into a deadlock because of this issue. They are also working on resolving minor fixes to help them boot further in games like Super Mario Odyssey, 1-2-Switch, and The Binding of Issac. Be sure to read the entire progress report on the yuzu blog. AI for game developers: 7 ways AI can take your game to the next level AI for Unity game developers: How to emulate real-world senses in your NPC agent behavior Unity 2018.2: Unity release for this year 2nd time in a row!

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, 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

Following the release of Unreal Engine 4.19 this April, Epic games have launched the Unreal Engine 4.20. This major update focuses on enhancing scalability and creativity, helping developers create more realistic characters, and immersive environments, for games, film, TV, and VR/AR devices. Multiple optimizations for Mobile Game development Epic games brought over 100 optimizations created for Fortnite on iOS and Android, for Unreal Engine 4.20. Hardware Occlusion Queries are now supported for high-end mobile devices on iOS and Android that support ES 3.1 or Vulkan using the GPU. Developers can also iterate and debug on Android without having to repackage the UE4 project. Game developers now have unlimited Landscape Material layers on mobile devices. Mixed Reality Capture Unreal Engine 4.20 provides a new Mixed Reality Capture functionality, which makes it easy to composite real players into a virtual space for mixed reality applications. It has three components: video input, calibration, and in-game compositing. You can use supported webcams and HDMI capture devices to pull real-world green-screened video into the Unreal Engine from a variety of sources.  The setup and calibration are done through a standalone calibration tool that can be reused across Unreal Engine 4 titles. Niagara Visual effects editor The Niagara visual effects Editor is available as an early access plugin. While the Niagara editor builds on the same particle manipulation methods of Cascade (UE4’s previous VFX), unlike Cascade, Niagara is fully Modular. UE 4.20 adds multiple improvements to Niagara Effect Design and Creation. All of Niagara’s Modules have been updated to support commonly used behaviors in building effects for games. New UI features have also been added for the Niagara stack that mimic the options developers have with UProperties in C++. Niagara now has support for GPU Simulation when used on DX11, PS4, Xbox One, OpenGL (ES3.1), and Metal platforms. Niagara CPU Simulation now works on PC, PS4, Xbox One, OpenGL (ES3.1) and Metal. Niagara was showcased at the GDC 2018 and you can see the presentation Programmable VFX with Unreal Engine’s Niagara for a complete overview. Cinematic Depth of Field Unreal Engine 4.20 also adds Cinematic Depth of Field, where developers can achieve cinema quality camera effects in real-time. Cinematic DoF, provides cleaner depth of field effect providing a cinematic appearance with the use of a procedural Bokeh simulation. It also features dynamic resolution stability, supports alpha channel, and includes settings to scale it down for console projects. For additional information, you can see the Depth of Field documentation. Proxy LOD improvements The Proxy LOD tool is now production-ready. This tool improves performance by reducing rendering cost due to poly count, draw calls, and material complexity. It  results in significant gains when developing for mobile and console platforms. The production-ready version of the Proxy LOD tool has several enhancements over the Experimental version found in UE4.19. Improved Normal Control: The use may now supply the hard-edge cutoff angle and the method used in computing the vertex normal. Gap Filling: The Proxy system automatically discards any inaccessible structures. Gap Filling results in fewer total triangles and a better use of the limited texture resource. Magic Leap One Early Access Support With Unreal Engine 4.20, game developers can now build for Magic Leap One. Unreal Engine 4 support for Magic Leap One uses built-in UE4 frameworks such as camera control, world meshing, motion controllers, and forward and deferred rendering. For developers with access to hardware, Unreal Engine 4.20 can deploy and run on the device in addition to supporting Zero Iteration workflows through Play In Editor. Read more The hype behind Magic Leap’s New Augmented Reality Headsets Magic Leap’s first AR headset, powered by Nvidia Tegra X2, is coming this Summer Apple ARKit 2.0 and Google ARCore 1.2 Support Unreal Engine 4.20 adds support for Apple’s ARKit 2.0, for better tracking quality, support for vertical plane detection, face tracking, 2D and 3D image detection, and persistent and shared AR experiences. It also adds support for Google’s ARCore 1.2, including vertical plane detection, Augmented Images, and Cloud Anchor to build collaborative AR experiences. These are just a select few updates to the Unreal Engine. The full list of release notes is available on the Unreal Engine blog. What’s new in Unreal Engine 4.19? Game Engine Wars: Unity vs Unreal Engine

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

Minecraft team released Minecraft Bedrock beta 1.9.0.3 last week. The latest release explores new feature such as scripting API, along with minor changes and fixes. Let’s have a look at what’s new in Minecraft Bedrock 1.9.0.3 (beta). Experimental Scripting API Minecraft Bedrock beta 1.9.0.3 comes with a new Scripting API that allows users to tweak the inner components within a game by writing commands. The Minecraft Script Engine uses the JavaScript language with the help of which Scripts can be written and bundled along with Behaviour Packs to invoke different actions. These actions include listening to and responding to game events, retrieving and modifying data in components that entities have, and that can affect different parts of the game. This feature is currently only available in Windows 10 on enabling the “Use Experimental Gameplay” setting. Changes and Fixes A minor change has been made to the size of the crossbow, as it now appears bigger in pillager’s (hostile illager mobs with crossbows in Minecraft) hands. A crash occurring during gameplay has been fixed. The issue of tamed llamas turning into bioluminescent creatures on opening an inventory has been resolved. Items in hand appearing completely white in colour have been fixed. Rare instances of players getting teleported into a boat while travelling near water have been fixed. The issue of logo not being visible on the loading screen after suspending and resuming the game has been fixed. With the new release, players no longer have an option to respawn in a semi-dead state in case they get killed while in a bed. The texture of the Beacon beams has been improved. The inventory blocks once again follow the textures that are set in blocks.json. Optimizations have been done to get a proper synchronization between client and server. Minecraft bedrock beta 1.9.0.3 is available only on Xbox One, Windows 10, and Android (Google Play). For more information, check out the official release notes. Minecraft Java team are open sourcing some of Minecraft’s code as libraries Minecraft is serious about global warming, adds a new (spigot) plugin to allow changes in climate mechanics A Brief History of Minecraft Modding

The rise of the video game industry over the last two decades has been staggering, to say the least. Considered to be an area with massive revenue potential, we have seen a revolution in the way games are designed, developed and played across various platforms.Unity, the most popular cross-platform game development platform, is now encouraging even the non-programmers to take up Unity game development by equipping them with state-of-the-art tools for designing interactive games. Unity game development simplified for non-developers These days, there are a lot of non-developers, game designers and even artists who wish to build their own games. Well, they are now in for a treat. Unity have come up with their 2D and 3D Game kits wherein the users develop 2D or 3D gameplays without the need to code. With the help of these game kits, beginners can utilize the elements, tools and systems within the kit to design their gameplay. The Unity 2D game kit currently supports versions Unity 2017.3 and higher, while the 3D game kit is supported by Unity 2018.1 or higher. Visual scripting with Bolt Unity  have also introduced a new visual scripting tool called Bolt, which allows non-programmers to create new gameplays from scratch and design interactive systems in Unity, without having to write a single line of code. With live editing, predictive debugging and a whole host of other features, Bolt ensures you can get started with designing your own game in no time at all. The idea of introducing these game kits and the Bolt scripting engine is to encourage more and more non-programmers to take up game development and let their creative juices flow. It will also serve as a starting point for absolute beginners to start their journey in game development. To know more about how to use these Unity game kits, check out the introduction to game kit by Unity.

GitHub for Unity is now available in version 1. GitHub for Unity 1.0 is a free and open source Unity editor extension that brings Git into Unity 5.6, 2017.x, and 2018.x. GitHub for Unity was announced as an alpha version in March 2017.  The beta version was released earlier this year. Now the full release GitHub for Unity 1.0 is available just in time for Unite Berlin 2018, scheduled to happen on June 19-21. GitHub for Unity 1.0 allows you to stay in sync with your team as you can now collaborate with other developers, pull down recent changes, and lock files to avoid troublesome merge conflicts. It also introduces two key features for game developers and their teams for managing large assets and critical scene files using Git, with the same ease of managing code files. Updates to Git LFS GitHub for Unity 1.0 has improved Git and Git LFS support for Mac. Git Large File Storage (LFS) replaces large files such as audio samples, videos, datasets, and graphics with text pointers inside Git. Previously, the package included full portable installations of the Git and Git LFS. Now, these are downloaded when needed, reducing the package size to 1.6MB. Critical Git and Git LFS updates and patches are distributed faster and in a more flexible way now. File locking File locking management is now a top-level view within the GitHub window. With this new feature developers can now lock or unlock multiple files. Other features include: Diffing support to visualize changes to files. The diffing program can be customized (set in the “Unity Preferences” area) directly from the “Changes” view in the GitHub window. No hassles of command line, as developers can now view project history, experiment in branches, craft a commit from their changes and push their code to GitHub without leaving Unity. A Git action bar for essential operations. Game developers will now get a notification within Unity whenever a new version is available. They can choose to download or skip the current update. Easy email sign in. Developers can sign in to their GitHub account with their GitHub username or the email address associated with their account. GitHub for Unity 1.0 is available for download at unity.github.com and from the Unity Asset Store. Lead developer at Unity, Andreia Gaita will conduct a GitHub for Unity talk on June 19 at Unite Berlin to explain how to incorporate Git into your game development workflow. Put your game face on! Unity 2018.1 is now available Unity announces a new automotive division and two-day Unity AutoTech Summit AI for Unity game developers: How to emulate real-world senses in your NPC agent behavior

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.

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?

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!

Xenko, a game engine owned by Silicon Studios has officially released its third version on August 2. The major change in Xenko 3.0 is the transition to being open-source. It also comes with changes made to the project system and added support for videos as well as hair, and skin rendering. Open-source and support Although Xenko won’t be supported officially anymore by Silicon Studios, the members of the Xenko development team will continue contributing to it. Virgile Bello, Lead Developer at Xenko Game Engine stated that he will personally work on it fulltime for the next couple of months in the official blog. The new version is released under the MIT License on Github. It is well received by the open source community. The Xenko repository has already gained almost 700 stars and a couple of issues showing active involvement. Changes in the Xenko 3.0 game engine Other than the open-source transition, there are a few other changes in the engine itself. Xenko 3.0 has made the switch to the new C# project system, which makes your game csproj as simple as a PackageReference to Xenko. This makes package management more convenient. It is now also possible to add video to your games with the latest release. This feature is not completely tested on all platforms so you may run into issues while implementing it. Hair and skin rendering support are also added, but like videos, this feature may need some improvements and tuning. The package names have also been changed since the move to open-source. The SiliconStudio.Xenko package is now Xenko. Also the SiliconStudio.Core and SiliconStudio.* packages are now Xenko.Core. Your earlier projects should automatically be updated but a backup before the upgrade is recommended. Virgile has set up a Patreon page if you’d like to support the project financially. The release notes state that the future plan is to split Xenko further into separate packages such as Xenko.Graphics, Xenko.Physics and Xenko.Editor. These are only the major changes. For the complete changelog and other minor updates in Xenko 3.0, you can see the Release Notes. Think Silicon open sources GLOVE: An OpenGL ES over Vulkan middleware Working with shaders in C++ to create 3D games Unity assets to create interactive 2D games [Tutorial]

Corona Labs announced yesterday that it’s making its free and cross-platform 2D game engine, Corona, available as open source under the GPLv3 license and commercial licenses. The license for builds and releases remains unchanged and the change applies only to the source code of the engine. Corona is a popular game engine for creating 2D games and apps for mobile, desktop systems, TV platforms, and the web. It is based on Lua language and makes use of over 1,000 built-in APIs and plugins, and Corona Native extensions (C/C++/Obj-C/Java). According to Vlad Sherban, product manager for Corona Labs, the Corona team had been discussing making Corona open source ever since it got acquired by Appodeal, back in 2017. “We believe that this move will bring transparency to the development process, and will allow users to contribute features or bug fixes to make the project better for everyone,” said Sherban. The team also mentions that transitioning to open source would help them respond quickly to market shifts and changes. It would also ensure that Corona stays relevant at all times for all mobile app developers. Moreover, now that Corona is open source, it will bring more visibility to the development process by letting users see what the engine team is working on and where the project is going. It will also offer extra benefits for businesses as they will be able to acquire a commercial license for source code and customize the engine for certain commercial projects. Additionally, Corona Labs won’t be collecting any statistics from apps built with daily build 2018.3454 or later. When Corona Labs was a closed source product, it used to collect basic app usage stats such as the number of sessions, daily average users, etc. With Corona available as open source now, there is no need to collect this data. “Powered by the new open source model and supported by the development of new features and bug fixes will make Corona more community driven — but not without our help and guidance --- going open source will provide confidence in the future of the engine and an opportunity to grow community involvement in engine development,” said Sherban. NVIDIA open sources its game physics simulation engine, PhysX, and unveils PhysX SDK 4.0 Microsoft open sources Trill, a streaming engine that employs algorithms to process “a trillion events per day” Facebook contributes to MLPerf and open sources Mask R-CNN2Go, its CV framework for embedded and mobile devices

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]