Tech News - Game Design

Yesterday, at the ongoing Game Developers Conference (GDC), Google marked its entry in the game industry with Stadia, its new cloud-based platform for streaming games. It will be launching later this year in select countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Europe. https://twitter.com/GoogleStadia/status/1108097130147860480 GDC 2019 is a five-day event, which commenced on 18th of this month at San Francisco, CA. It is the world’s largest game industry event which brings together 28,000 attendees to share ideas and discuss the future of the gaming industry. What is Stadia? Phil Harrison, Google’s Vice President, and GM, announcing the game streaming platform said, “Our ambition is far beyond a single game. The power of instant access is magical, and it's already transformed the music and movie industries." Stadia is a cloud-based game streaming platform that aims to bring together, gamers, YouTube broadcasters, and game developers “to create a new experience”. The games get streamed from any data center to any device that can connect to the internet like TV, laptop, desktop, tablet, or mobile phone. With this, gamers will be able to access their games anytime and virtually on any screen. And, game developers will be able to use nearly unlimited resources for developing games. Since all the graphics processing happens on off-site hardware, there will be little stress on your local hardware. The demo that Google shared at GDC currently streams video at 1080p, 60 frames per second. At launch, Stadia will come with up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second with approximately 25Mbps of bandwidth. In the future, Google is planning to offer 8K resolution and 120 frames per second. Google, in partnership with AMD, is building a custom GPU for its data centers, which will deliver 10.7 teraflops of power.  Also, each Stadia instance will be powered by a custom 2.7GHz x86 processor with 16GB of RAM. Stadia Controller At GDC, Google also talked about a dedicated controller for Stadia that directly connects to a game session in the cloud through WiFi. The controller provides a button for capturing, saving, and sharing gameplay in up to 4K resolution. It also comes integrated with Google Assistant and a built-in microphone. According to a blog post shared by Google, it is not guaranteed that the controller will be offered for sale as the device is not yet authorized by the Federal Communications Commission. While unveiling the game-streaming service, Google did not reveal any details on the pricing. Also, the details regarding when exactly we can expect this service to reach the gamers and developers are unknown. To know more in detail about Stadia, check out the official announcement on Google’s blog post. Google is planning to bring Node.js support to Fuchsia Google to be the founding member of CDF (Continuous Delivery Foundation) Google announces the stable release of Android Jetpack Navigation

Blender, a free and open source 3D computer graphics software, celebrated its 25th birthday yesterday. Blender team celebrated the birthday by publishing a post that talked about the journey of blender from 1993 to 2018, taking a trip down the memory lane. Blender’s Journey (1994 - 2018) The Blender team states that during the 1993 Christmas Ton Roosendaal, creator of Blender started working on the Blender software, making use of the designs that he made during his 1993 course.                                                   Original design doc from 1993 The first blender version came to life on January 2nd, 1994 and used the subdivision-based windowing system working. This date has now been marked as Blender’s official Birthday and Roosendaal even has an old backup of this version on his SGI Indigo2 workstation. Blender was first released publicly online on 1st January 1998 as an SGI freeware. The Linux and Windows versions of Blender were released shortly after. In May 2002, Roosendaal started the non-profit Blender Foundation. The first goal for the Blender Foundation was to find a way to continue the development and promotion of Blender as a community-based open source project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=164&v=8A-LldprfiE Blender's 25th birthday With the popularity of the internet in the early 2000s, the source code for Blender became available under GNU General Public License (GPL) on October 13th, 2002. This day marked Blender as the open source and free 3D creation software that we use till date. Blender team started “Project Orange” in 2005, that resulted in the world’s first and widely recognized Open Movie “Elephants Dream”. The success of the open movie project led to Roosendaal establishing the “Blender Institute” in summer 2007. Blender Institute has now become the permanent office and studio where the team organizes the Blender Foundation goals and facilitates the Open Projects related to 3D movies, games or visual effects. In early 2008, Roosendaal started the Blender 2.5 project, which was a major overhaul of the UI, tool definitions, data access system, event handling, and animation system. The main goal of the project was to bring the core of Blender to the contemporary interface standards as well as the input methods. The first alpha version for Blender 2.5 was presented on Siggraph 2009, with the final release of 2.5 getting published in 2011. In 2012, the Blender team put its focus on further developing and exploring a Visual Effect creation pipeline that included features such as motion tracking, camera solving, masking, grading and good color pipeline. Coming back to 2018, it was just last week when the Blender team released Blender 2.8 with a revamped user interface, high-end viewport, and other great features. Mozilla partners with Khronos Group to bring glTF format to Blender Building VR objects in React V2 2.0: Getting started with polygons in Blender Blender 2.5: Detailed Render of the Earth from Space

The Blender team released beta version 2.8 of its Blender, a free and open-source 3D creation software, earlier this week. Blender 2.8 beta comes with new features and updates such as EEVEE, a high-end Viewport, Collections, Cycles, and 2D animation among others. Blender is a 3D creation suite that offers the entirety of the 3D pipeline including modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, and motion tracking. It allows video editing as well as game creation. What’s new in Blender 2.8 Beta? EEVEE Blender 2.8 beta comes with EEVEE, a new physically based real-time renderer. EEVEE works as a renderer for final frames, and also as the engine driving Blender’s real-time viewport. It consists of advanced features like volumetrics, screen-space reflections and refractions, subsurface scattering, soft and contact shadows, depth of field, camera motion blur and bloom. A new 3D Viewport There's a new and modern 3D viewport that was completely rewritten. It can help optimize the modern graphics cards as well as add powerful new features. It consists of a workbench engine that helps visualize your scene in flexible ways. EEVEE also helps power the viewport to enable interactive modeling and painting with PBR materials. 2D Animation There are a new and improved 2D drawing capabilities, which include a new Grease Pencil. Grease Pencil is a powerful and new 2D animation system that was added, with a native 2D grease pencil object type, modifier, and shader effects. In a nutshell, it helps to create a user-friendly interface for the 2D artist. Collections Blender 2.8 beta introduces ‘collections’, a new concept that lets you organize your scene with the help of Collections and View Layers. Cycles Blender 2.8 beta comes with a new feature called Cycles that includes new principled volume and hair shaders, bevel and ambient occlusion shaders, along with many other improvements and optimizations. Other features Dependency Graph: In blender 2.8 beta, the core object evaluation and computation system have been rewritten. Blender offers better performance for modern many-core CPUs as well as for new features in the future releases. Multi-object editing: Blender 2.8 beta comes with multiple-object editing that allows you to enter edit modes for multiple objects together. For more information, check out the official Blender 2.8 beta release notes. Mozilla partners with Khronos Group to bring glTF format to Blender Building VR objects in React V2 2.0: Getting started with polygons in Blender Blender 2.5: Detailed Render of the Earth from Space

Yesterday, Unity Technologies won its first Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for excellence in engineering creativity. Unity has won this award for their collaboration with Disney Television Animation on the broadcast-quality shorts Baymax Dreams. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), a service organization for advancement in arts and sciences of television, have acknowledged the efforts taken by Unity in Baymax Dreams. Earlier this month Unity also won an Emmy for 3D Engine Software for the Production of Animation. Baymax Dreams series is based on the story of a 14-year old tech genius Hiro and his robot, named, Baymax. The characterization and the visual effects are mesmerizing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpuUnNLZf5k Different Unity teams from animation, films, Virtual Reality (VR), and gaming, united for this creative project. They designed the entire workflow and matched it as per the story and the vision of the director. Graphics Engineer, John Parsaie used Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) to create materials like Baymax’s emissive ‘night light’. He also worked with the Unity artist, Keijiro Takahashi on the voxelization effect. This effect can be seen, when Baymax first enters his dream state. The characters and artwork were built and reviewed in VR. This, of course, helped in increasing clarity and imagining the visuals better. This also enabled experimenting with different styles and formats. The team at Unity made use of multiple methods, including, Unity’s multi-track sequencer, Timeline and Cinemachine’s suite of smart cameras and Post-Processing Stack v2. These were used for layout, lighting, and compositing. To read more about this news, check out the official blog post by Unity. The Technology and Engineering Emmy® Awards in partnership with the NAB show (National Association of Broadcasters) will be held in Las Vegas on Sunday, April 7, 2019. Exploring shaders and materials in Unity 2018.x to develop scalable mobile games Building your own Basic Behavior tree in Unity [Tutorial] Getting started with ML agents in Unity [Tutorial]

Erik Kusma Faye-Lund, a graphics programmer, introduced Zink on Wednesday. Zinc is an OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan. It is a Mesa Gallium driver that supports OpenGL implementation in Mesa to provide hardware-accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available. Currently, Zink is only available as a source code, distro-packages aren’t available yet. It has only been tested on Linux. To build Zink, one needs to have Git, Vulkan headers and libraries, Meson and Ninja. Also, one needs to build dependencies to compile Mesa. Erik says, “And most importantly, we are not a conformant OpenGL implementation. I’m not saying we will never be, but as it currently stands, we do not do conformance testing, and as such we neither submit conformance results to Khronos.” What Zink may include 1. Just one API OpenGL is a big API and is well-established as a requirement for applications and desktop compositors. But since the release of Vulkan, there are two APIs for essentially the same hardware functionality but both are important. As the software-world is working hard to implement Vulkan support everywhere, this is leading to complexity. One would only require things like desktop compositors to support one API in the future. There might be a future where OpenGL’s role could purely be one of legacy application compatibility. Maybe Zink can help in making the future better! 2. Lessen the workload of GPU drivers Everyone wants less amount of code to maintain for legacy hardware but the drivers to maintain are growing rapidly. Also, new drivers have been written for old hardware. If the hardware is capable of supporting Vulkan, it could be easier to only support Vulkan “natively”, and do OpenGL through Zink. There aren’t infinite programmers that can maintain every GPU driver forever. But maybe with Zink, driver-support might get better and easier. 3.  Zink comes with benefits Since Zink is implemented as a Gallium driver in Mesa, there are some side-benefits that come “for free”. For instance, projects like Gallium Nine or Clover could, in theory, may work on top of the i965 Vulkan driver through Zink in the future. In the coming years, Zink might also act as a cooperation-layer between OpenGL and Vulkan code in the same application. 4. Zink could be used as a closed-source Vulkan driver Zink might also run smoothly on top of a closed-source Vulkan driver and still get proper window system integration. What does Zink require? Currently, Zink requires a Vulkan 1.0 implementation and the following extensions: VK_KHR_maintenance1: This extension is required for the viewport flipping. VK_KHR_external_memory_fd : This extension is required for getting the rendered result on screen. Additionally, Erick has also shared a list of features that Zink doesn’t support, which include: Currently, glPointSize() is not supported. Though writing to gl_PointSize from the vertex shader does work. The texture borders are currently black due to Vulkan’s lack of arbitrary border-color support. Currently, no control-flow is supported in the shaders. There is no GL_ALPHA_TEST and glShadeModel(GL_FLAT) support yet. It would be interesting to see how Zink turns out when the features go live! Read more about this news on Kusma’s official website. Valve’s Steam Play Beta uses Proton, a modified WINE, allowing Linux gamers to play Windows games UI elements and their implementation Game Engine Wars: Unity vs Unreal Engine

To provide compatibility with a wide range of Windows-only games to all Linux users, a Beta version of the new and improved Steam Play is now available. It uses Proton, a modified distribution of Wine, to allow games which are exclusive to Windows to run on Linux and macOS operating systems. Proton is an open source tool, allowing advanced users to alter the code to make their own local builds. The included improvements to Wine have been designed and funded by Valve, in a joint development effort with CodeWeavers. In order to identify games that currently work great in this compatibility environment and solve the issues, if any, they are testing the entire Steam catalog. The list of games that they are enabling with this Beta release include: Beat Saber, Bejeweled 2 Deluxe, Doki Doki Literature Club!, DOOM, Fallout Shelter, FATE, FINAL FANTASY VI, and many more. Using Steam Play the gamers can purchase the games once and play anywhere. Whether you have purchased your Steam Play enabled game on a Mac, Windows, or Linux, you will be able to play on the other platform free of charge. What are the improvements introduced? You can now install and run Windows games with no Linux version currently available, directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with native Steamworks and OpenVR support. Improved game compatibility and reduced performance impact is facilitated by DirectX 11 and 12 whose implementations are now based on Vulkan. The support for fullscreen games is improved allowing them to seamlessly stretch to the desired display without interfering with the native monitor resolution or requiring the use of a virtual desktop. The support for game controller is improved enabling games to automatically recognize all controllers supported by Steam. Improved performance for multi-threaded games as compared to vanilla Wine. They have mentioned that there could be a performance difference for games where graphics API translation is required, but there is no fundamental reason for a Vulkan title to run any slower. You can find out more about the Stream Play Beta, the full list of supported games, and how Proton works in the Steam post. Facebook launched new multiplayer AR games in Messenger Meet yuzu – an experimental emulator for the Nintendo Switch What’s got game developers excited about Unity 2018.2?

Ready Players. One Two Three! We begin with the epic battle between the two most prominent game engines out there: Unity vs Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine has been surviving for the past 20 years, the legacy engine while Unity, relatively new, (although it’s almost 12 years) is nevertheless an equal champion. We will be evaluating these engines across 6 major factors. Without further ado, let the games begin. Unity vs Unreal Engine Performance Performance is a salient factor when it comes to evaluating a game engine’s performance. The Unreal Engine uses C++. C++ is a lower level programming language that provides developers with more control over memory management. On top of this, Unreal Engine gives developers full access to the C++ source code allowing editing and upgrading anything in the system. Unity, on the other hand, uses C#, where the memory management is out of a developer’s control. No control over memory signifies that the garbage collector can trigger at random time and ruin performance. Unreal offers an impressive range of visual effects and graphical features. More importantly, they require no external plugins (unlike Unity) to create powerful FX, terrain, cinematics, gameplay logic, animation graphs, etc. However, UE4 seems to perform various basic actions considerably slower. Actions such as starting the engine, opening the editor, opening a project, saving projects, etc take a lot of time hampering the development process. Here’s where Unity takes the edge. It is also the go-to game engine when it comes to creating mobile games. Considering the above factors we can say, in terms of sheer performance, Unreal 4 takes the lead over Unity. But Unity may be making up for this shortfall by being more in sync with the times i.e., great for creating mobile games, impressive plugins for AR etc. Also read about Unity 2D and 3D game kits to simplify game development for beginners. Learning curve and Ease of development Unity provides an exhaustive list of resources to learn from. These documentations are packed with complete descriptions complemented with a number of examples as well as video and text tutorials and live training sessions. Along with the official Unity resources, there are also high-quality third-party tutorials available. The Unreal Engine offers developers a free development license and source code but for 5% royalty. The Unreal Engine 4 has Blueprint visual scripting. These tools are designed for non-programmers and designers to create games without writing a single line of code. They feature a better-at-glance game logic creation process, where flowcharts with connections between them are used for representing the program flow. These flowcharts make games a lot faster to prototype and execute. Unity offers an Asset store for developers to help them with all aspects of design. It features a mix of animation and rigging tools, GUI generators and motion capture software. It also has powerful asset management and attributes inspection. Unity is generally seen as the more intuitive and easier to grasp game engine. Unreal Engine features a simplistic UI that doesn’t take long to get up and running. With this, we can say, that both Unity and Unreal are at par in terms of ease of use. Unity vs Unreal Engine Graphics When it comes to graphics, Unreal Engine 4 is a giant. It includes capabilities to create high-quality 2D and 3D games with state-of-the-art techniques such as particle simulations systems, deferred shading, lit translucency, post-processing features and advanced dynamic lighting. Unity is also not far behind with features such as static batching, physically-based shading, shuriken particle system, low-level rendering access etc.  Although Unreal engine comes out to be the clear winner, if you don't need to create next-gen level graphics then having something like Unreal Engine 4 may not be required, and hence Unity wins. Platform Support/compatibility Unity is a clear winner when it comes to the number of platforms supported. Here’s a list of platforms offered by both Unity and Unreal. Platform Unreal Unity iOS Available Available Android Available Available VR Available Available (also HoloLens) Linux Available Available Windows PC Available Available Mac OS X Available Available SteamOS Available Available HTML5 Available Not Available Xbox One Available Available (also Xbox 360) PS4 Available Available Windows Phone 8 Not Available Available Tizen Not Available Available Android TV and Samsung Smart TV Not Available Available Web Player Not Available Available WebGL Not Available Available PlayStation Vita Not Available Available Community Support Community support is an essential criterion for evaluating a tool’s performance, especially true for free tools. Both Unity and Unreal have large and active communities. Forums and other community sources have friendly members that are quick to respond and help out. Having said that, a larger community of game developers contribute to Unity’s asset store. This saves significant time and effort, as developers can pick out special effects, sprites, animations, etc directly from the store rather than developing them from scratch. Correspondingly, more developers share tutorials and offer tech support on Unity. Unity vs Unreal Engine Pricing Unity offers a completely free version ready for download. This is a great option if you are new to game development.  The Unity Pro version, which offers additional tools and capabilities (such as the Unity profiler) comes at $1,500 as a one-time charge, or $75/month. Unreal Engine 4, on the other hand, is completely free. There are no Pro or Free versions. However, Unreal Engine 4 has a royalty fee of 5% on resulting revenue if it exceeds $3000 per quarter. Unreal Engine 4 is also completely free for colleges and universities, although the 5% royalty is still attached. Both game engines are extremely affordable, Unity gives you access to the free version, which is still a powerful engine. Unreal Engine 4 is of course completely free. The verdict The above analysis favors Unreal as the preferred gaming engine. In reality, though, it all boils down to the game developer. Choosing the right engine really depends on the type of game you want to create, your audience, and your expertise level (such as your choice of programming language). Both these engines are evolving and changing at a rapid pace and it is for the developer to decide where they want to head. Also, check out: Unity Machine Learning Agents: Transforming Games with Artificial Intelligence Unity plugins for augmented reality application development Unity releases ML-Agents v0.3: Imitation Learning, Memory-Enhanced Agents and more