Tech News - 3D Game Development

Yesterday, the team at Unity released the next update of Unity for 2018. Unity 2018.3 has been released with improved Prefab workflows, Visual Effect Graph (Preview), and an updated Terrain System along with more than 2000 new features, fixes, and improvements. Improved Prefab Workflows Prefabs workflows have been improved in Unity 2018.3 with a focus on reusability, control, and safety. These updates implement support for nesting and make it safer for more efficient to work with Prefabs for teams in all sizes. Nested Prefabs make it easier for teams of all sizes to: Split up Prefabs into multiple entities for greater efficiency Reuse any content, from small to large Work on different parts of content simultaneously Visual Effect Graph (Preview) The Visual effect graph will make it easy for artists to create stand-out VFX for games and other projects in real-time. Developers can create simple and complex effects, with this tool. It also includes an API for creating custom nodes to meet the needs of advanced creators. Updated Terrain System The updated terrain tools provide developers with better performance and improved usability. Operations are shifted over to the GPU which helps creators get faster access to faster tools, larger brush sizes, improved previews, and the ability to paint Terrain tile borders with automatic seam-stitching. Improvements have been made to support the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) and the Lightweight Render Pipeline (LWRP). FPS Sample Project Unity 2018.3 comes with FPS Sample which gives game developers source code access to a connected multiplayer FPS experience. They can download the sample and use it as a starting point to learn the latest technologies such as HDRP, or for their next connected game. In Unity 2018.3 significant improvements have been made to how Timeline Animation Tracks handle animations on the root transform of a hierarchy. This includes new Track Offset modes, Adapts to scale, improved editor preview, and depreciation of Root Motion. Mobile improvements include Dynamic Resolution Scaling support for Vulkan and Metal, Android AppBundle generation support and faster APK package build times on Android with APKzlib. Plans for 2019 For 2019 they are planning to release new announcements and innovations These include a new MegaCity Demo to showcase Unity’s approach to Data-Oriented Design. Another demo, Cinecast (Experimental) is an AI cinematography system that enables the creation of movie-like cinematic sequences from gameplay, in real-time. Project MARS is an extension for Unity that helps developers build applications that intelligently interact with any real-world environment, with little-to-no custom coding. 2019 will also see the preview of Project Tiny, which is Unity’s new, highly-modular runtime and Editor mode that enables the creation of small, light, and fast instant games and experiences. Find the full list of Unity 2018.3 features on the Unity blog. Unity introduces guiding Principles for ethical AI to promote responsible use of AI. Unity has won the Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for excellence in engineering creativity What you should know about Unity 2018 Interface

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 Game studio, who brought the phenomenal online video game Fortnite to life, has launched an Epic games store. In a blog post on the Unreal Engine website, Epic stated that the store will have a “fair economics and a direct relationship with players”. All players who buy a game will be subscribed to a developer’s newsfeed where they can contact them for updates and news about upcoming releases. Developers can also control their game pages and connect with YouTube content creators, Twitch streamers, and bloggers with the recently launched Support-A-Creator program. Epic games store will also follow an 88/12 revenue split. “Developers receive 88% of revenue,” the company wrote. “There are no tiers or thresholds. Epic takes 12%. And if you’re using Unreal Engine, Epic will cover the 5% engine royalty for sales on the Epic Games store, out of Epic’s 12%.” Source: Unreal Engine Epic’s inspiration for the 88/12 split may have possibly been taken from Valve’s Steam store (a major competitor to Epic games) who have tweaked their revenue making process. “Starting from October 1, 2018, when a game makes over $10 million on Steam, the revenue share for that application will adjust to 75 percent/25 percent on earnings beyond $10 million,” Valve wrote in the official blog post. “At $50 million, the revenue share will adjust to 80 percent/20 percent on earnings beyond $50 million. The Epic game store with launch with a few selected games on PC and Mac, then it will open up to other games and to Android and other open platforms throughout 2019. With this move, Epic Games are looking to attract more gamers and developers to their platform. And a better revenue split will automatically do most of the work for them. Developer-favour revenue splitting will also increase the market where previously there was a lack of competition in PC-game distribution by the immovable 30/70 split. Twitteratis were fairly happy with this announcement and expressed their feelings and agreed on it to being a threat to Valve. https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1069975572984385537 https://twitter.com/SpaceLyon/status/1069979966501208065 https://twitter.com/lucasmtny/status/1069970212424953857 https://twitter.com/nickchester/status/1069970684112265217 The Epic Games team will reveal more details on upcoming game releases at the Game Awards this Thursday. Read the blog post by Epic games to know more. 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 Implementing fuzzy logic to bring AI characters alive in Unity based 3D games

NVIDIA team unveiled PhysX SDK 4.0, yesterday, and also announced that it's making its popular real-time physics simulation engine, PhysX, available as open source under the simple BSD-3 license. “We’re doing this because physics simulation — a long key to immersive games and entertainment — turns out to be more important than we ever thought. PhysX will now be the only free, open-source physics solution that takes advantage of GPU acceleration and can handle large virtual environments”, says the NVIDIA team. NVIDIA had designed PhysX specifically for the purpose of hardware acceleration using powerful processors that comprise hundreds of processing cores. This design offers a dramatic boost in the physics processing power, which in turn, takes the gaming experience to a whole new level, offering more rich, and immersive physical gaming environments. The new PhysX SDK 4.0 is a scalable, open source, and multi-platform game physics solution that offers support to a wide range of devices, ranging from smartphones to high-end multicore CPUs and GPUs. PhysX 4.0 SDK has been upgraded to offer industrial-grade simulation quality at game simulation levels. PhysX 4.0 comes with Temporal Gauss-Seidel Solver (TGS), that is capable of adjusting the constraints within games with each iteration, depending on the bodies’ relative motion. Other than that, the overall stability has been improved and now allows for new filtering rules for kinematics and statics. Some of the major features of PhysX SDK 4.0, includes effective memory usage management, support offered for different measurement units and scales, multiple broad-phase, convex-mesh, triangle mesh, and primitive shape collision detection algorithms. PhysX SDK 4.0 will be made available on December 20, 2018. Public reaction to the news is largely positive as PhysX was earlier available for commercial use for free, but now that its available as open source, people can interact deeply with the physics engine, modifying it as per their needs at absolutely no cost. https://twitter.com/puradawid/status/1069614540671909888 https://twitter.com/tauke/status/1069603803463184384 For more information, check out the official NVIDIA blog post. NVIDIA open sources its material definition language, MDL SDK NVIDIA unveils a new Turing architecture: “The world’s first ray tracing GPU” BlazingDB announces BlazingSQL , a GPU SQL Engine for NVIDIA’s open source RAPIDS

Electronic Arts (EA) announced Project Atlas, a new AI-powered, cloud computing based game development platform, earlier this week. Project Atlas comes with high-quality LIDAR Data, improved scalability, cloud-based engine, and enhanced security among others. Information regarding when the general availability of Project Atlas hasn’t been disclosed yet. “We’re calling this Project Atlas and we believe in it so much that we have over 1,000 EA employees working on building it every day, and dozens of studios around the world contributing their innovations, driving priorities, and already using many of the components” mentioned Ken Moss, Chief Technology Officer at Electronic Arts. Let’s discuss the features of Project Atlas. High-quality LIDAR Data Project Atlas will be using high-quality LIDAR data about real mountain ranges. This data will then be further passed through a deep neural network which has been trained to create terrain-building algorithms. With the help of this AI-assisted terrain generation, designers will be able to generate not just a single mountain, but a series of mountains along with the surrounding environment to bring the realism of the real world. “This is just one example of dozens or even hundreds where we can apply advanced technology to help game teams of all sizes scale to build bigger and more fun games,” says Moss. Improved Scalability Earlier, all simulation or rendering of in-game actions used to be limited to either the processing performance of the player’s console or to a single server that would interact with your system. But, now, with the help of the cloud, players will have the ability to tap into a network of many servers, that are dedicated to computing complex tasks. This will deliver hyper-realistic destruction within new HD games, that would be highly indistinguishable from real life. ”We’re working to deploy that level of gaming immersion on every device”, says Moss. Moreover, the integration of distributed networks at the rendering level means infinite scalability from the cloud. So, whether you’re on a team of 500 or just 5, you’ll now be able to scale games and create immersive experiences, in unprecedented ways. Cloud-based engine and Moddable asset database Now with Project Atlas, you can turn your own vision into reality, and share the creation with your friends as well as the whole world. You can also market your ideas and visions to the community. Keeping this in mind, Project Atlas team is planning on having a cloud-enabled engine that’ll be able to seamlessly integrates different services. Along with a moddable asset database, there’ll also be a common marketplace so that users can for share and rate other players’ creations. “Players and developers want to create. We want to help them. By blurring the line between content producers and players, this will truly democratize the game experience” adds Moss. Enhanced Security Project Atlas comes with a unified platform, where game makers have the ability to seamlessly deploy security measures such as SSL certificates, configuration, appropriate encryption of data, and zero-downtime patches for every feature from a single secure source. This will allow them to focus more on creating games and less on taking the required security measures. “We’re solving for some of the manually intensive demands by bringing together AI capabilities in an engine and cloud-enabled services at scale. With an integrated platform that delivers consistency and seamless delivery from the game, game makers will free up time, brainspace, and energy for the creative pursuit”, says Moss. For more information, check out the official Project Atlas blog. Xenko 3.0 game engine is here, now free and open-source Meet yuzu – an experimental emulator for the Nintendo Switch AI for Unity game developers: How to emulate real-world senses in your NPC agent behavior

The Go team has released version 1.8 of its 2D game library called Ebiten, yesterday. Ebiten 1.8 comes with new features such as experimental WebAssembly Port, newly added APIs, and bug fixes among other updates. Ebiten is a very simple 2D game library in Go that offers 2D graphics (Geometry/Color matrix transformation, Various composition modes, Offscreen rendering, Fullscreen, Text rendering), input and audio support. Experimental WebAssembly Port The Go team has added a WebAssembly port to Ebiten 1.8, but this is still in the experimental phase. This new feature compiles to a single WebAssembly module including the Go runtime for goroutine scheduling, garbage collection, maps, and other Go essentials, that results in a module of at least 2MB, or 500KB when compressed. WebAssembly refers to a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. It is designed for the compilation of high-level languages such as C/C++/Rust. This helps with easily deploying the apps on client and server applications. New APIs added New APIs have been added for different features such as polygon, TPS, Vsync, Package audio, and Package ebitenutil, in Ebiten 1.8. For polygon, type DrawTrianglesOptions API has been added which represents options to render triangles on an image. Another API type Vertex has also been added that represents a vertex passed to DrawTriangles. For TPS, func CurrentTPS() float64 API is added that returns the current TPS and represents the number of update functions called in a second. Another added API, func MaxTPS() int: returns the current maximum TPS. Also, func SetMaxTPS(tps int) API is added that sets the maximum TPS (ticks per second) and represents the number of the updating function called per second. For Vsync, func IsVsyncEnabled() bool API returns a boolean value that indicates if the game is using the display's vsync. Another func SetVsyncEnabled(enabled bool) API sets a boolean value that indicates if the game uses the display's vsync. For Package audio, the func (c *Context) IsReady() bool API returns a boolean value that indicates whether the audio is ready or not.  For Package ebitenutil, func DebugPrintAt(image *ebiten.Image, str string, x, y int) API draws the string str on the image at (x, y) position. Bug Fixes The bug causing multi monitors issue has been fixed. Also, issues related to macOS 10.14 Mojave has been fixed. For more information, check out the official release notes. GitHub is bringing back Game Off, its sixth annual game building competition, in November Microsoft announces Project xCloud, a new Xbox game streaming service, on the heels of Google’s Stream news last week Now you can play Assassin’s Creed in Chrome thanks to Google’s new game streaming service

The GitHub team announced yesterday that they’re coming back with their sixth annual game jam, called Game Off in November. In Game Off, participants are given one-month to create games based on a theme provided by GitHub. Anyone including newbies and professional game developers can participate, without any restrictions. Moreover, the game can be simple or complex, depending upon your preference. The Game Off team recommends using open source game engines, libraries, and tools but you can make use of any technology you want, as long as it is reliable. Also, both team and solo participation are acceptable. In fact, you can also make multiple submissions. The theme for the game off last year was “throwback”. There were over 200 games created including old-school LCD games, retro flight simulators, squirrel-infested platformers, etc. This year’s theme will be announced on Thursday, November 1st, at 13:37 pm. Last year Game off’s overall winner and the one that was voted best gameplay was a game called Daemon vs. Demon. This game included a hero that was supposed to slay rogue demons to continue remaining in the world of the living. This game was built by a user named Securas from Japan, with the open source Godot game engine. There were other categories such as best audio, best theme interpretation, best graphics, etc, for which winners were picked. To participate in Game Off, it is necessary for you to have a GitHub account. Then, you can join the Game Off challenge on itch.io. You don’t need to have a separate itch.io account, you can simply log in with your GitHub account. Once you’re done with creating an itch.io account, all you need to do is create a new repository to store the source code and other related assets. Just make sure that you push your changes to the game before December 1st. “As always, we'll highlight some of our favorites games on the GitHub Blog, and the world will get to enjoy (and maybe even contribute to or learn from) your creations”, mentions the GitHub team. For more information, check out the official Game off announcement. Meet wideNES: A new tool by Nintendo to let you experience the NES classics again Meet yuzu – an experimental emulator for the Nintendo Switch Now you can play Assassin’s Creed in Chrome thanks to Google’s new game streaming service

Microsoft announced a new game streaming project for Xbox yesterday, namely, Project xCloud. Microsoft is not the only one who has rolled out their game streaming service, Google announced a new experimental game streaming service, namely, Project Stream, last week, that lets the users play Assassin’s Creed in Chrome among other things. Project xCloud is a game streaming technology that enables existing Xbox users to play on any device that they want to without being limited to a particular device. This means gamers can choose either console or PC depending on their preference. Mobile-only players can also access the worlds, characters and immersive stories that they haven’t been able to experience before on a mobile. Project xCloud provides gamers with plenty of options and does so without altering the performance and experience of the game. “Our goal with Project xCloud is to deliver a quality experience for all gamers on all devices that’s consistent with the speed and high-fidelity gamers experience and expect on their PCs and consoles”, mentions Kareem Choudhry, Corporate VP, Gaming Cloud, Microsoft on the announcement page.” Microsoft Microsoft admits that Cloud game-streaming is a “multi-faceted, complex challenge”. In order to provide high-quality experience across different devices, it is crucial to watch out for obstacles, such as low-latency video streamed remotely, and support for a large, multi-user network. “With our nearly 40 years of gaming experience starting with PC, as well as our deep experience of being a platform company, we are equipped to address the complex challenge of cloud game-streaming”, mentions Choudhary. Microsoft had been working on Project xCloud over the past few years and aims to bring the public trials of this project in 2019. Moreover, Microsoft wants to make it easy for developers to bring their content to Project xCloud and deliver an amazing experience to the existing Xbox players. Developers will be able to deploy and dramatically scale to hundreds of millions of users across all devices on Project xCloud with no additional work. Microsoft has data centers in 54 Azure regions and services available in 140 countries, meaning that Azure has the scale to offer great gaming experience for players worldwide, regardless of their location. “We’ve enabled compatibility with existing and future Xbox games by building out custom hardware for our datacenters that leverages our years of console and platform experience. We’ve architected a new customizable blade that can host the component parts of multiple Xbox One consoles, as well as the associated infrastructure supporting it. We will scale those custom blades in datacenters across Azure regions over time”, writes Choudhry. Project xCloud was tested yesterday by Microsoft. The test was carried out on different devices (mobile phones, tablets) paired with an Xbox Wireless Controller through Bluetooth. As of now, the test experience is running at 10 megabits per second. Microsoft is also developing a new, game-specific touch input overlay that offers a maximum response in a minimal footprint to players wanting to play without a controller. Additionally, Project xCloud makes game streaming possible on 4G networks. “We are looking forward to learning with you during our public trials next year and sharing more details as we continue on this journey to the future of gaming with you at the center”, says Choudhary. For more information, check out the official Microsoft blog. Microsoft open sources Infer.NET, it’s popular model-based machine learning framework Microsoft announces new Surface devices to enhance user productivity, with style and elegance Microsoft’s new neural text-to-speech service lets machines speak like people

Google announced a new experimental game streaming service, namely, Project Stream, earlier this week. Google calls this project a “technical test” and has partnered up with Ubisoft, one of the most popular video game publishers, to stream their upcoming Assassin’s Creed Odyssey via Project Stream on Chrome. “We’ve been working on Project Stream, a technical test to solve some of the biggest challenges of streaming. For this test, we’re going to push the limits with one of the most demanding applications for streaming—a blockbuster video game,” writes Catherine Hsiao on the announcement blog post. Google points out that their major goal with Project Stream is for it to effectively stream AAA game titles. This is because the Google team is inspired by the technology that goes behind AAA video games. Additionally, working with a AAA game title is more challenging as opposed to working with a game that comprises less intense graphics. “Every pixel is powered by an array of real-time rendering technology, artistry, visual effects, animation, simulation, physics, and dynamics. We’re inspired by the game creators who spend years crafting these amazing worlds, adventures, and experiences, and we’re building technology that we hope will support and empower that creativity,” states the post.   Project Stream  With Project Stream, Google is working to ensure that latency stays minimal and the graphics of the game are not compromised when using its streaming service. “The idea of streaming such graphically-rich content that requires near-instant interaction between the game controller and the graphics on the screen poses a number of challenges.  When streaming TV or movies, consumers are comfortable with a few seconds of buffering at the start, but streaming high-quality games requires latency measured in milliseconds, with no graphics degradation,” adds Google. Google has made limited spaces available for users to try Project Stream, starting October 5. If you want to participate then you can apply on Project Stream’s official website. Participation is only open for the U.S. residents who are 17 years or older. For more information, check out the official announcement. Google Project Zero discovers a cache invalidation bug in Linux memory management, Ubuntu and Debian remain vulnerable Google announces new Artificial Intelligence features for Google Search on its 20th birthday Google announces the Beta version of Cloud Source Repositories

Yesterday, the Khronos Group announced that its Vulkan API (modern cross-platform graphics and compute API) has become the world’s first graphics API to include a formal memory model (Vulkan Memory model) for its associated GLSL™ and SPIR-V™ programming languages. This announcement has a number of components that come together to significantly boost the robustness of the Vulkan standard for programming correctness and sophisticated compiler optimizations. The Vulkan memory model Vulkan’s memory model is based on the C++ memory model. However, it adds valuable functionality such as scopes, storage classes, and memory availability and visibility operations. These capabilities can be exploited to reduce the cost of synchronization and thus increase performance. Scopes allow synchronization to be limited to threads in close proximity to each other. Storage classes allow synchronization to be limited to specific types of memory. Availability and visibility operations give control over when and how cache maintenance operations are performed in systems with noncoherent cache hierarchies. Additional memory model materials The Khronos Group has lined up additional memory model materials in provisional form to enable feedback from the C++ community, academics, compiler engineers and software developers throughout the industry with experience in multi-threaded communication and memory usage. The additional memory model materials include: A provisional Vulkan Memory Model Specification: This specification includes extensions for Vulkan, SPIR-V, and GLSL that gives Vulkan developers additional control over how their shaders synchronize access to memory in a parallel execution environment. Memory model extension conformance tests to help shader compilers ensure that they implement the specified memory model synchronization functionality correctly. A formal description of the Vulkan memory model using Alloy, which is a language developed by MIT for describing logical structures and a tool for exploring them. This is the first instance where Khronos has used an Alloy model for its specifications. This is because, Alloy precisely documents the interactions of memory operations between multiple threads and devices, and enables formal modeling and experimentation. To know more about the Vulkan Memory model in detail, visit its GitHub page. macOS gets RPCS3 and Dolphin using Gfx-portability, the Vulkan portability implementation for non-Rust apps AMD open sources V-EZ, the Vulkan wrapper library Think Silicon open sources GLOVE: An OpenGL ES over Vulkan middleware

The Vulkan Portability implementation, gfx-portability allows non-Rust applications that use Vulkan to run with ease. After improving the functionality of gfx-portability’s Metal backend through benchmarking Dota2, and verifying certain functionalities through the Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS), developers are now planning to expand their testing to other projects that are open source, already using Vulcan for rendering and finally lacking strong macOS/Metal support. The projects which matched their criteria were  RPCS3 and Dolphin. However, the team discovered various issues with both RPCS3 and Dolphin projects. RPCS3 Blockers RPCS3 satisfies all the above mentioned criteria. It is an open-source Sony PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger written in C++ for Windows and Linux. RPCS3 has a Vulkan backend, and some attempts were made to support macOS previously. The gfx-rs team added a surface and swapchain support to start of with the macOS integration. This process identified a number of blockers in both gfx-rs and RPCS3. The RPCS3 developers and the gfx-rs teams collaborated to quickly address the blockers. Once the blockers were addressed, gameplay was rendered within RPCS3. Dolphin support for macOS Dolphin, the emulator for two recent Nintendo video game consoles, was actively working on adding support for macOS. While being tested with gfx-portability the teams noticed some further minor bugs in gfx. The issues were addressed and the teams were able to render real gameplay. Continuous Releases for the masses The team has already started automatically releasing gfx-portability binaries under GitHub latest release -> the portability repository. Currently the team provides MacOS (Metal) and Linux (Vulkan) binaries, and will add Windows (Direct3D 12/11 and Vulkan) binaries soon. These releases ensure that users don’t have to build gfx-portability themselves in order to test it with an existing project. The binaries are compatible with both the Vulkan loader on macOS and by linking the binaries directly from an application.   The team was successfully able to run RPCS3 and Dolphin on top of gfx-portability’s Metal backend and only had to address some minor issues in the process. Stability and performance will improve as more real world use cases are tested. You can read more about this on gfx-rs.github.io.   OpenAI Five loses against humans in Dota 2 at The International 2018 How to use artificial intelligence to create games with rich and interactive environments [Tutorial] Best game engines for AI game development  

The Unity Team has come out with  Unity Game Studio Report 2018 to share insights of its relevant benchmarking data on the existing studios with other emerging studios. The aim is to share information with the emerging studios on how the fellow creative studio teams operate and make successful games. The Unity Game Studio Report 2018 has been collated based on a study with the leads of 1,445 small and medium independent creative studios (ranging in size from 2 to 50 employees) from across the globe. This includes the studios using Unity as their main game engine as well as the studios using other game engines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hoO_5qNel0 Unity Game Studio Report 2018 Let’s have a look at few of the major highlights of this report. Studios are recent, independent and compact As per the 2018 Unity Game Studio report, 91% of the surveyed studios that have been recently established are fully independent and the majority of them are developing their own IPs. Studios develop, publish and promote games on their own                                          Unity Game studio report 2018 40% of the existing and emerging studios are focussed on developing AR/VR, which proves that platforms are becoming more established among independent creators. The majority of studios are publishing their project themselves. For marketing, the popular media for these studios are Facebook and Twitter. The Unity Game Studio report also highlights that 53% of the studios monetize their projects via premium payments, while 36% of them plan on monetizing with the freemium model.   Studios need a wide range of tools to run 69% of the emerging studios use team collaboration along with cloud storage solutions. Less than 40% of the studios use analytics to analyze players’ behavior. Studios run on a lean budget                                               Unity Game studio report 2018 As mentioned in the Unity Game Studio Report, approximately 60% of the budget for all studios comes from freelancing and self-funding. But, a small part from their budget still gets spent on training the employees. The report also highlights the hard work that the majority of the independent game studios put in to continue to establish themselves. “Not only do (independent developers) bring their creative vision to life, they do so with ingenuity, flair, and lots of bootstraps, overcoming challenges posed by constrained resources with imagination, moxie, and dedication to their love of creating games”, as written by Jen MacLean, Executive Director at the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) in the report foreword. For more information, check out the complete Unity Game Studio Report 2018.   Unity switches to WebAssembly as the output format for the Unity WebGL build target Implementing the Unity game engine and assets for 2D game development [Tutorial] Designing UIs in Unity: What you should know

Nintendo has come out with a new tool, called, wideNES, to let you relive your childhood days. Only this time, you can record the screen while playing in real-time, gradually building up a map of the different levels explored. The new tool wideNES, is a feature of ANESE, which is an NES emulator developed by Daniel Prilik. What’s great about wideNES is the fact that it syncs the action on-screen to the generated map, thereby, allowing players to see ahead of the levels by “peeking past the edge of the NES’s screen”. Also, this mapping technique is not applicable to only a few games i.e. it enables the wideNES to work with a wide range of NES games. Let’s look at how wideNES works. Rendering graphics Back in the 80s, the NES (Nintendo entertainment system) used MOS 6502 CPU. It also used a powerful graphics coprocessor called the Picture Processing Unit (PPU) in conjunction with the 6502 CPU. The wideNES also makes use of PPU. PPU is an integrated circuit in the NES which generates video signals from graphics data stored in memory. The chip is known for using very little memory to store graphical data. In wideNES, the CPU updates the PPU on what has changed throughout the game using Memory Mapped I/O.  This process comprises of setting up new sprite positions ( Great for moving objects: player, enemies, projectiles), new level data, and new viewport offsets. With wideNES running in an emulator, it’s easy to track the values written to the PPUSCROLL register (controls viewport X/Y offset) i.e. it’s easy to measure how much of the screen has been scrolled between two frames. But, there’s a limitation to this technique as you can’t get a complete map of the game unless the player manually explores the entire game. Scrolling past 256 The NES is an 8-bit system and in this, the PPUSCROLL register accepts only 8-bit values. This limited the maximum scroll-offset in NES to just 255px. So, on scrolling past 255, PPUSCROLL register would become 0, explaining why Smart Mario Bros would bounce-back to the start on Mario moving too far right. With wideNES, scrolling past 256 is possible as it completely ignores the PPUCTRL register, and simply looks at the PPUSCROLL delta between frames. So, in case the PPUSCROLL unexpectedly jumps up to ~256, it indicates that the player character has moved left/up a screen, whereas if the PPUSCROLL jumps down to ~0, then that means the player has moved right/down a screen. However, this approach does not work for games that have static-UI elements such as HUDs, Masks, and Status Bars at the edges of the screen. To solve this issue, wideNES implements several rules which detect and mask-off static screen elements automatically. Detecting “Scenes” Most NES games are split into many smaller “scenes” with doors or transition screens that move between them. The wideNES uses perceptual hashing to detect whenever a scene changes. Perceptual hash functions work on keeping the similar inputs “close” to one another in the output space making them perfect for detecting similar images. But, perceptual hashes can also get incredibly complex with some being able to detect similar images even if few of the images have been rotated, scaled, stretched, and color shifted. But, wideNES doesn’t need a complex hash function as each frame is always the exact same size. Now, work is still being done on improving wideNES core and on improving ANESE’s wideNES implementation. For now, you can explore the ANESE emulator and take the trip down the memory lane! For more information, check out the official wideNES blog post. Meet yuzu – an experimental emulator for the Nintendo Switch 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

Godot is an open source community-driven 2D and 3D game engine. It works on a unified interface and is cross-platform. Godot is completely free and under the MIT license. Games made in Godot can be exported to Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and HTML5. As of a recent commit made two days ago, the master branch of Godot is now in the alpha stage. This means that v3.1 is now considered feature-complete and the focus of the developers will be only on bug fixing along with improvements to existing features. Such a stage is called as a feature freeze. Any new features will have to wait for 3.1-stable to come in a couple of months. Contributors are requested not to make feature pull requests as they have a potential to create new bugs. PRs can be made once the feature freeze is lifted and a stable release is out. The feature pull requests currently made won’t be closed but will be targeted at the v3.2 milestone release. There are some exceptions to the freeze rule. Enhancements to the major new features of the 3.1 release may be considered, especially usability fixes. Work on mono/C# support is continuous. Approved features discussed with contributors on IRC  may still be considered if they are a priority for the 3.1 release. Features of the Godot game engine version 3.1 Godot comes with hundreds of built-in nodes that make game design easy Flexible scene system allows creating node compositions with support for inheritance and instancing A visual editor packed with all the tools you need Persistent live editing without loss of changes after stopping the game which also works on mobile devices Ability to create your own custom tools with ease via the tool system For more details on Godot 3.1, visit the GitHub page. How to Create 2D Navigation with the Godot Engine Unity 2018.2: Unity release for this year 2nd time in a row! Xenko 3.0 game engine is here, now free and open-source

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]