Tech News - Game Development

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

The highly anticipated Unreal Engine 4.19 is now generally available. This release hosts a new Live Link plugin, improvements to Sequencer, new Dynamic Resolution feature, and multiple workflow and usability improvements. In addition to all of these major updates, this release also features a massive 128 improvements based on queries submitted by the Unreal Engine developers community on GitHub. Unreal Engine 4.19 allows game developers to know exactly what their finished game will look like at every step of the development process. This update comes with three major goals: Let developers step inside the creative process. Build gaming worlds that run faster than ever before. Give developers full control. Here's a list of all the major features and what they bring to the game development process: New Unreal Engine 4.19 features Live Link Plugin Improvements The Maya Live Link Plugin is now available and can be used to establish a connection between Maya and UE4 to preview changes in real-time. Virtual Subjects are added to the Live Link. It can also be used with Motion Controllers. Live Link Sources can now define their own custom settings. Virtual Initialization function and Update DeltaTime parameter are also added to Live Link Retargeter API. Source: Unreal Engine blog Unified Unreal AR framework The Unreal Augmented Reality Framework provides a unified framework for building Augmented Reality (AR) apps for both Apple and Google handheld platforms using a single code path. Features include functions supporting Alignment, Light Estimation, Pinning, Session State, Trace Results, and Tracking. Temporal upsampling The new upscaling method, Temporal Upsample performs two separate screen percentages used for upscaling: Primary screen percentage that by default will use the spatial upscale pass as before; Secondary screen percentage that is a static, spatial only upscale at the very end of post-processing, before the UI draws. Dynamic resolution Dynamic Resolution adjusts the resolution to achieve the desired frame rate, for games on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It uses a heuristic to set the primary screen percentage based on the previous frames GPU workload. Source: Unreal Engine blog Physical light units All light units are now defined using physically based units. The new light unit property can be edited per light, changing how the engine interprets the intensity property when doing lighting related computations. Source: Unreal Engine blog Landscape rendering optimization The Landscape level of detail (LOD) system now uses screen size to determine detail for a component, similar to how the Static Mesh LOD system works. Starting from this release, all existing UE4 content that supports SteamVR is now compatible with HTC's newly-announced Vive Pro. These are just a select few updates to the Unreal Engine. The full list of release notes is available on the Unreal Engine forums.

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