Tech News - 3D Game Development

Google plans to unveil a new gaming-related announcement on March 19th at the Game Developers Conference. This could possibly be based on their Project Stream announced last year. Google teased this announcement to members of the press with a GIF that shows light at the end of a tunnel followed by the date March 19th and at the end are the words "Gather around". There is no concrete information available about this but it is speculated that it’ll be a subscription based game streaming service using Project stream. Unveiling this service at the GDC would make a lot of sense as the conference will attract a lot of gamers. A Hacker news user suggests: “Project Stream will probably allow those on Linux, macOS, and especially ChromeOS to play most games, including recent ones. Which may let people switch platform more easily and/or avoid dual-booting.” Source: Engadget Another user thinks that the subscription service would need a partnership with gaming companies: “If it is Project Stream, Google better announce some serious partnerships alongside the service. Their best bet would probably be to outright buy a major publisher,” Google is not alone or first, in this space, Microsoft also has a game streaming service called xCloud. Amazon is also building a game streaming service. The idea is to handle the graphics-heavy computation at the server end and the users will be able to ‘stream’ the game without the need for high-end hardware. Microsoft is planning to bring Xbox Live gaming to Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch, and more Amazon is reportedly building a video game streaming service, says Information Now you can play Assassin’s Creed in Chrome thanks to Google’s new game streaming service

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

On 12th February, Epic Games released a preview build of Unreal Engine 4.22, and a major upgrade among numerous other features and fixes is the support for real-time ray tracing and path tracing. The new build will extend its preliminary support for Microsoft's DirectX Ray-tracing (DXR) extensions to the DirectX 12 API. Developers can now try their hands at ray-traced games developed through Unreal Engine 4. There are very limited games that support raytracing. Currently, only  Battlefield V (Ray Traced Reflections) and Metro Exodus (Ray Traced Global Illumination) feature ray tracing effects, which are developed in the proprietary Frostbite 3 and 4A Game Engines. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]Fun Fact: Ray tracing is a much more advanced and lifelike way of rendering light and shadows in a scene. Movies and TV shows use this to create and blend in amazing CG work with real-life scenes leading to more life-like, interactive and immersive game worlds with more realistic lighting, shadows, and materials.[/box] The patch notes released by the team states that they have added low level support for ray tracing: Added ray tracing low-level support. Implemented a low-level layer on top of UE DirectX 12 that provides support for DXR and allows creating and using ray tracing shaders (ray generation shaders, hit shaders, etc) to add ray tracing effects. Added high-level ray tracing features Rect area lights Soft shadows Reflections Reflected shadows Ambient occlusion RTGI (ray traced global illumination) Translucency Clearcoat IBL Sky Geometry types Triangle meshes Static Skeletal (Morph targets & Skin cache) Niagara particles support Texture LOD Denoiser Shadows, Reflections, AO Path Tracert Unbiased, full GI path tracer for making ground truth reference renders inside UE4. According to HardOCP,  the feature isn't technically tied to Nvidia RTX but since turing cards are the only ones with driver support for DirectX Raytracing at the moment, developers need an RTX 2000 series GPU to test out Unreal's Raytracing. There has been much debate about the RTX offered by NVIDIA in the past. While the concept did sound interesting at the beginning, very few engines adopted the idea- simply because previous generation processors cannot support all the features of NVIDIA’s RTX. Now, with DXR in the picture, It will be interesting to see the outcome of games developed using ray tracing. Head over to Unreal Engine’s official post to know more about this news. Implementing an AI in Unreal Engine 4 with AI Perception components [Tutorial] Unreal Engine 4.20 released with focus on mobile and immersive (AR/VR/MR) devices Game Engine Wars: Unity vs Unreal Engine

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

The 2019 Game Developers Conference published the results of their seventh annual state of the industry survey two days ago. The report added two new questions this time, should the games industry unionize? and will the games industry unionize?. Almost 4000 developers participated in the survey and nearly 50% of them believed that game industry workers should unionize. GDC 2019 is scheduled to take place March 18-22 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California. 47 percent gamers said yes when asked whether they thought game industry workers should unionize; 26 percent said maybe, 16 percent said no, and 11 percent said they didn’t know. However, figures fell when it came to actual implementation. When asked whether they think video game workers actually will unionize, only 21 percent said yes. 39 percent said “maybe.” 24 percent of respondents said they don’t think it will happen, and 15 percent said that they don’t know. One developer responded saying, “There is too much supply: too many people want into the industry. Those who unionize will be shoved out of the way as companies hire those with fewer demands." The gaming industry has been abuzz with talks of unionization for quite some time now. Game Workers Unite, is a democratic organization fighting for union rights and gathering support for unionization in the gaming industry. Last year, in December, a UK chapter of Game Workers Unite became a legal trade union. Developers were also asked what PC/Mac game storefronts they sell their games on. The most popular answer was Steam, with roughly 47 percent saying that they sell games on Valve’s storefront. However, when asked if Steam still justifies its 30 percent cut, only 6 percent said yes, and 17 percent said maybe. On asking developers (both indie and professionals) how many hours they work per week on average, 44 percent of developers worked more than 40 hours per week. Almost 6 percent worked 76 to 80 hours, "suggesting that deadline-related crunch can go far beyond normal working hours," according to the survey. Other questions were based on what game platforms developers are creating for, iOS Android etc. The entire survey is available to be downloaded for free. Electronic Arts (EA) announces Project Atlas, a futuristic cloud-based AI-powered game development platform Packt partners with Humble Bundle to bring readers a stash of game development content Best game engines for Artificial Intelligence game development

Yesterday, Adobe announced that it has acquired Allegorithmic. Allegorithmic is the creator of Substance, and other 3D editing and authoring tools for gaming, entertainment, and post-production. Allegorithmic’s customer base is diverse ranging across gaming, film and television, e-commerce, retail, automotive, architecture, design and advertising industries. Popular Algorithmic users include Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Ikea, BMW, Louis Vuitton, Foster + Partners among others. Allegorithmic’s Substance tools are used in games, such as Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and Forza. Allegorithmic’s tools have been used for visual effects and animation for some of the popular movies like Blade Runner 2049, Pacific Rim Uprising, and Tomb Raider. Adobe will help in accelerating Allegorithmic’s product roadmap and go-to-market strategy and further extend its reach among enterprise, SMB, and individual customers. Sebastien Deguy, CEO and founder at Allegorithmic will take up a leadership role as the vice president and handle Adobe’s broader 3D and immersive designs. With this acquisition, Adobe also wants to make Creative Cloud (a set of applications and services from Adobe Systems that gives users access to a collection of software used for graphic design, video editing and more) the home to 3D design tools. How will Creative Cloud benefit from Allegorithmic Adobe and Allegorithmic previously worked together three years ago. As the result of their work, Adobe introduced a standard PBR material for its Project Aero, Adobe Dimension, Adobe Capture, and every 3D element in Adobe Stock. Now, Adobe will empower video game creators, VFX artists, designers, and marketers by combining Allegorithmic’s Substance 3D design tools with Creative Cloud’s imaging, video and motion graphics tools. Creative Cloud can benefit from Allegorithmic’s tools in gaming, entertainment, retail and even for designing textures and materials that give 3D content detail and realism. Creative Cloud tools such as Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Dimension, and After Effects are already in use and are of great significance for content creators, the addition of Allegorithmic’s Substance tools to Creative Cloud would turn out to be more powerful. In a blog post, Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice president at Creative Cloud, said, “Our goal with Creative Cloud is to provide creators with all the tools they need for whatever story they choose to tell. Increasingly, stories are being told with 3D content. That’s why I’m excited to announce that today Adobe has acquired Allegorithmic, the industry standard in tools for 3D material and texture creation for gaming and entertainment.” Sebastien Deguy, said, “Allegorithmic and Adobe share the same passion for bringing inspiring technologies to creators. We are excited to join the team, bring together the strength of Allegorithmic’s industry-leading tools with the Creative Cloud platform and transform the way businesses create powerful, interactive content and experiences.” In future, Adobe might focus on making Allegorithmic tools available via subscription. Some users are concerned about the termination of the perpetual license and are unhappy about this news. It would be interesting to see the next set of updates from the team at Adobe. https://twitter.com/sudokuloco/status/1088101391871107073 https://twitter.com/2017_nonsense/status/1088181496710479872 Adobe set to acquire Marketo putting Adobe Experience Cloud at the heart of all marketing Adobe glides into Augmented Reality with Adobe Aero Adobe to spot fake images using Artificial Intelligence

Last week, a lot of drama had been going between Improbable and Unity, when Unity updated their TOS Clause 2.4 to restrict developers who planned to use Unity in any kind of distributed network capacity. Yesterday, in a blog post Unity improved on their  End User License Agreement to make it more open for developers. Per this new update, developers can now use any third party service that integrate into Unity. However, the choice of support of this service remains with Unity. Basically, Unity will integrate their own services, but not block developers from using competitive third-party services. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]Unity TOS Section 2.4 Unity developers are free to use any service offered to Unity developers (each, a “Third Party Service”).  Unity does not have any obligation to provide support for any Third Party Service provider or Third Party Service under this Agreement. Third Party Service providers may not, without Unity’s express written permission: (1) use a stylized version of any Unity name, trademark, logos, images or product icons, or other Unity-owned graphic symbols; (2) use a product name confusingly similar to a Unity product or that could be construed by Unity developers as being a Unity product or service; or (3) create or use any marketing materials that suggest an affiliation with, or endorsement by, Unity.  All use of Unity’s trademarks must comply with Unity’s Trademark Guidelines.[/box] Unity has also shared updates on their relationship with Improbable and has clarified that Improbable or SpatialOS is no longer blocked on their licenses and can be used for development and shipping games. “Improbable is no longer in breach by providing you a service, and that we are able to reinstate their licenses. But we do not consider them a partner, and cannot vouch for how their service works with Unity as we have no insight into their technology or how they run their business.”, they clarified in a blog post. Unity’s news has been taken positively by the developer community. Here are a few comments from a thread on hacker news. “Good move on their part, but the whole saga is a reminder of the risks of using non-free software, especially if it's a subscription. At any point, the developers can pull the rug out from under you.” “I've been following this rather closely as a company who provides backend services (so we're classified as a 3rd party service) to studios in the industry, many of whom use Unity. I'm rather surprised by this about-face, especially considering Unity had the upper hand in negotiations with Improbable. A pleasant surprise, and a much-needed one in the games industry where locked-down tech is often the norm.” Improbable says Unity blocked SpatialOS; Unity responds saying it has shut down Improbable and not Spatial OS Unity and Baidu collaborate for simulating the development of autonomous vehicles Unity 2018.3 is here with improved Prefab workflows, Visual Effect graph and more

Valve, a US-based video game development company, shared a sneak-peek of eight new features and changes that it's planning to work on in 2019, earlier this week. Let’s have a look at some of these new features that Valve is working on shipping this year. Store discoverability One of the things that Valve is focussing on is store Discoverability. “We’re working on a new recommendation engine powered by machine-learning, that can match players to games based on their individual tastes (on steam)”, reads the valve blog post. It will be working on bringing forth more broadcasting and curating features. Valve also mentioned that it is constantly analyzing and assessing the design of Steam, its online game store. Steam China Valve is working on bringing Steam to China. The company has teamed up with Perfect World, a Chinese Game development company, to bring Steam to Chinese users. Valve will update more regarding this in the upcoming months. New Events System Valve will be focussing on upgrading the events system in Steam. This will allow users to highlight the interesting activities within games such as tournaments, streams, or weekly challenges. Steam TV and chat The Valve team is going to be expanding Steam TV beyond broadcasting the specific tournaments and special events and will provide support to all games. Additionally, it will also be shipping a new steam chat mobile app. The app will let its users share their favourite GIFs with friends. Steam PC Cafe Program Valve will also be shipping an all-new PC Cafe Program that will allow players to have a good experience while using Steam in thousands of PC Cafes Worldwide. For more information, check out the official Steamworks announcement. Valve’s Steam Play Beta uses Proton, a modified WINE, allowing Linux gamers to play Windows games SteamVR introduces new controllers for game developers, the SteamVR Input system

According to a report by Information, Amazon is developing a video game streaming service. Microsoft and Google have also previously announced similar game streaming offerings. In October, Google announced a new experimental game streaming service, namely, Project Stream. In the same month, Microsoft’s gaming chief Phil Spencer confirmed a streaming game service for any device at the E3 conference called the Project X Cloud. Amazon’s idea is to potentially bring top gaming titles to virtually anyone with a smartphone or streaming device. The service will handle all the compute-intensive calculations needed to run graphics-intensive games in the cloud. It would then stream them directly into a smart device so that gamers can get the same experience as running the titles natively on a high-end gaming system. Information says that although the Amazon gaming service isn’t likely to be launched until next year, Amazon has begun talking to games publishers about distributing their titles through its service. Most likely, this initiative would succeed considering Amazon is the biggest player in the cloud market. Amazon currently owns 32 percent of the cloud market, compared with Microsoft Azure’s 17 percent and Google Cloud’s 8 percent. These make better chances for Amazon to succeed. This would make it easier for gamers to take advantage of Amazon’s vast cloud offerings and play elaborate, robust games even on their mobile devices As the Information noted, a successful streaming platform may possibly overcome the long-standing business model of the gaming world, in which customers pay out $50 to $60 for a Triple-A title. Amazon is yet to shell out the details of such a video gaming service officially. Check out the full report on The Information. Microsoft announces Project xCloud, a new Xbox game streaming service Now you can play Assassin’s Creed in Chrome thanks to Google’s new game streaming service. Corona Labs open sources Corona, its free and cross-platform 2D game engine

A fresh drama has emerged between Unity and Improbable. According to yesterday’s blog post by the SpatialOS creator, Improbable says that Unity has blocked SpatialOS based on a recent change in Unity’s terms of service (clause 2.4). Unity has contested this stating Improbable's blog post was misleading and added that they have terminated their relationship with Improbable without affecting anyone using SpatialOS. What did Improbable say? Unity had updated their terms of service on Dec 5 and then informed Improbable directly on Jan 9 that their service has been revoked on the Unity’s game engine. Per the blog, “all existing SpatialOS games using Unity, including production games and in development games of all developers, are now in breach of Unity’s license terms.” The blog also states that Unity has put a stop for Improbable to continue working with the Unity engine, affecting their ability to support games. The blog post disapproved Unity’s decision stating that Unity’s actions have done harm to projects across the industry, especially affecting vulnerable or small scale developers. Moreover, this is a threat to games that have been funded based on the promise of SpatialOS to deliver next-generation multiplayer as their choice of game engine. The improbable team has also stated that going further they would be helping developers using SpatialOS with Unity to finish, release and operate their games and set up an emergency fund. They are also fully open-sourcing the code of SpatialOS Game Development Kit for Unity, under the MIT license. How did Unity respond? Unity has termed Improbable's blog as ‘incorrect’ stating that they have “terminated their relationship with Improbable due to a failed negotiation with them after they violated Unity’s Terms of Service. However, anyone using SpatialOS will not be affected.” Unity also assures that even if a game developer runs a Unity-based game server on their own servers or generic cloud instances (like GCP, AWS or Azure), they are covered by Unity’s EULA. “From a technical standpoint, this is what our clarification on our TOS means: if you want to run your Unity-based game-server, on your own servers, or a cloud provider that provides you instances to run your own server for your game, you are covered by our EULA. We will support you as long as the server is running on a Unity supported platform.” Unity blocked Improbable because the company was making unauthorized and improper use of Unity’s technology and name in connection with the development, sale, and marketing of its own products. Early last year, they informed Improbable in person that they were in violation of Unity’s Terms of Service. Then, after six months, Unity informed Improbable about the violation in writing. Seeing no changes, Unity decided to take strict action by turning off Improbable’s Unity Editor license keys, about two weeks ago. Unity says they are trying to resolve the dispute with Improbable without affecting developers. SpatialOS Developers will receive support for any outstanding questions or issues directly at support@unity3d.com. What about Unity’s TOS Clause 2.4? Unity’s updated clause states that they are prohibiting "streaming or broadcasting so that any portion of the Unity Software is primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet or other networks to end user devices..." This is alarming for Unity asset and service providers and developers. As explained by a gamedev.net user, this could mean that “any kind of processing offload for entity state occurring on a server or cloud provider (such as SpatialOS) is no longer allowed. As such, developers who planned to use Unity in any kind of distributed network capacity may find themselves in a difficult situation.” The creator of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has reacted harshly to this clause as well. "We specifically make the UE4 EULA apply perpetually so that when you obtain a version under a given EULA, you can stay on that version and operate under that EULA forever if you choose." https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1083407460252217346 This battle has definitely added a boost to Unreal Engine’s popularity. https://twitter.com/patrickol/status/1083476747700576256 https://twitter.com/hippowombat/status/1083581963422691329 Epic Games have also said that it has partnered with Improbable to establish a $25 million fund to "assist developers who are left in limbo by the new engine and service incompatibilities that were introduced." Unity and Baidu collaborate for simulating the development of autonomous vehicles Unity 2018.3 is here with improved Prefab workflows, Visual Effect graph and more Unity ML-Agents Toolkit v0.6 gets two updates: improved usability of Brains and workflow for Imitation Learning

CES 2019, the annual consumer electronics show in Las Vegas will go from Tuesday, Jan. 8 through Friday, Jan. 11. However, the conference has unofficially kicked off on Sunday, January 6, followed by press conferences on Monday, Jan. 7. Over the span of these two days, a lot of companies showcased their latest projects and announced new products, software, and services. Let us look at the key announcements made by prominent tech companies so far. Nvidia Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled some "amazing new technology innovations." First, they announced that over 40 new laptop models in 100-plus configurations will be powered by NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs. Turing-based laptops will be available across the GeForce RTX family — from RTX 2080 through RTX 2060 GPUs, said Huang. Seventeen of the new models will feature Max-Q design. Laptops with the latest GeForce RTX GPUs will also be equipped with WhisperMode, NVIDIA Battery Boost, and NVIDIA G-SYNC. GeForce RTX-powered laptops will be available starting Jan. 29 from the world's top OEMs. Nvidia also announced the first 65-inch 4K HDR gaming display that will arrive in February for $4,999. LG LG Electronics, which have a major press release today, has already confirmed a variety of their new products. These include the release of LG's 2019 TVs with Alexa and Google Assistant support, 8K OLED, full HDMI 2.1 support and more. Also includes, LG CineBeam Laser 4K projector for voice control, new sound bars included with Dolby Atmos and Google Assistant and LG Gram 17 and new 14-inch 2-in-1. Samsung Samsung announced that their Smart TVs will be soon equipped with iTunes Movies & TV Shows and will support AirPlay 2 beginning Spring 2019. AirPlay 2 support will be available on Samsung Smart TVs in 190 countries worldwide. Samsung is also launching a new Notebook Odyssey to take PC gaming more seriously posing a threat to competitors Razer and Alienware. HP HP also announced HP Chromebook 14, at CES 2019. It is the world's first AMD-powered Chromebook running on either an AMD A4 or A6 processor with integrated Radeon R4 or R5 graphics. It has 4GB of memory and 32GB of storage and support for Android apps from the Google Play Store. These models will start shipping in January starting at $269. More announcements: Asus launches a new 17-inch, 10-pound Surface Pro gaming laptop, the Asus ROG Mothership. It has also announced Zephyrus S GX701, the smallest and lightest 17-inch gaming laptop yet. Corsair’s impressive compact gaming desktops come with Core i9 chips and GeForce RTX graphics L’Oréal’s newest prototype detects wearers’ skin pH levels Acer’s new Swift 7 will kill the bezel when it launches in May for $1,699. It is one of the thinnest and lightest laptops ever made Audeze’s motion-aware headphones will soon recreate your head gestures in-game Whirlpool is launching a Wear OS app for its connected appliances with simplified voice commands for both Google Assistant and Alexa devices. Vuzix starts selling its AR smart glasses for $1,000 Pico Interactive just revealed the Pico G2 4K, an all-in-one 4K VR headset based-on China’s best-selling VR unit, the Pico G2. It’s incredibly lightweight, powerful and highly customizable for enterprise purposes. Features include kiosk mode, hands-free controls, and hygienic design. You can have a look at all products that will be showcased at CES 2019. NVIDIA launches GeForce Now’s (GFN) ‘recommended router’ program to enhance the overall performance and experience of GFN NVIDIA open sources its game physics simulation engine, PhysX, and unveils PhysX SDK 4.0 Uses of Machine Learning in Gaming

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

Yesterday, many Fortnite players reported long queues for matches and timeouts while trying to play the game. The Fortnite outage happened during the holiday season. https://twitter.com/Soldier_Dimitri/status/1078029461461913614 Epic games knew about this issue and tweeted that an investigation is underway to find the cause of the timeouts and slowdowns when some users were trying to log in and play. Epic had told the players to check the status on their website. https://twitter.com/FortniteGame/status/1078027774034657282 TechCrunch noted this Fortnite outage and was able to replicate it. The game was continuously held for about five minutes and then timed out. Epic games reported a “minor service outage” that affected game services. Within three hours of acknowledging, Epic games also issued a fix for the issue and let the users know on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FortniteGame/status/1078065448585965568 A member from Epic Games explained the reason for the Fortnite outage on Reddit: “Quick summary is that deploying a fix for elf challenge reward not being granted exposed a latent bug in our profile migration code (the code that fixes up players). This caused players to be kicked etc and triggered our waiting room. We fixed the issue and deployed a new backend, however, didn’t see a recovery in login success. This ended up due to “sticky session” configuration having been lost on our waiting room load balances when moving them to ALBs. This meant that there was a 90% chance of having to requeue after hitting the front of the line. D’oh. This should all be fixed now and we are seeing a recovery in numbers/login throughout / waiting room / etc.” Gamers have appreciated the company’s transparency in letting users know about what happened: “As a company, I applaud you for your transparency. It is highly unusual and I hope you continue to set precedence in this industry.” Fortnite creator Epic games launch Epic games store where developers get 88% of revenue earned; challenging Valve’s dominance Epic games CEO calls Google “irresponsible” for disclosing the security flaw in Fortnite Android Installer before patch was ready Google is missing out $50 million because of Fortnite’s decision to bypass Play Store

This week, Unity Technologies, the real-time 3D development platform creator, announced its collaboration with Baidu Inc., China's leading Internet giant for developing a real-time simulation product that creates virtual environments while allowing developers to test autonomous vehicles in real-world situations. This real-time simulation will be available for developers taking part in Baidu’s Apollo platform-- an open and reliable platform working towards the development, testing, and deployment of Levels 3, 4, 5 autonomous vehicles. It includes all the different areas of the self-driving technology spectrum, right from perception and localization to 3D simulation and end-to-end training and testing of autonomous vehicles. The collaboration between Baidu and Unity is expected to gear up the development of a simulation environment for testing autonomous driving software. This simulation will enable developers to digitalize the entire development process. There are advantages of using simulations and virtual environment in development and testing. For instance, risky or implausible scenarios can be generated and tested in simulation whereas it might be impossible to do the same in the real world. Moreover, dangerous situations which can’t be tested in real life can be created and tested using such a simulation. “The ability to accurately conduct autonomous testing in a simulated environment allows for millions of simulations to simultaneously occur, providing Apollo partners with a competitive advantage while helping to keep their business costs down,” said Tim McDonough, general manager of Industrial, Unity Technologies. Unity’s real-time 3D platform helps in reducing errors and risks while increasing efficiency and speed of testing by offering simulations that replicate real-world scenarios. Apart from Baidu, Unity also works the largest OEMs in the world by improving the way they design, build, service and sell automobiles. The company has experts from companies such as BMW,  Toyota, General Motors, Volvo, and the Volkswagen Group. Unity also recently launched SimViz Solution Template, a package that provides OEMs and helps in the building of simulation environments. Jaewon Jung, Chief Architect of Baidu’s Intelligent Driving Group said, “By using a platform like Unity, our developers can focus on testing and research without worrying about non-functional environments or building something from scratch. The Unity-powered game engine simulation for Apollo has the ability to expedite autonomous vehicle validation and training with precise ground truth data in a more effective and safer way.” It would be interesting to see how this collaboration accelerates Baidu’s development of autonomous driving software. Read more about this news, check out Business Wire’ post. Unity ML-Agents Toolkit v0.6 gets two updates: improved usability of Brains and workflow for Imitation Learning Unity 2018.3 is here with improved Prefab workflows, Visual Effect graph and more Unity introduces guiding Principles for ethical AI to promote responsible use of AI