Tech News - Game Optimization

The EU has sent Valve, the creator of desktop gaming’s biggest storefront Steam and five other video game publishers a ‘Statements of Objections’ for “geo-blocking” PC video game purchases. In a statement, the EU found that these companies “prevented consumers from purchasing videogames cross-border from the other Member States, which is a breach of EU competition rules.” Valve is the owner of the largest PC video game distribution platform called “Steam”. The other five PC video game publishers include Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media, and ZeniMax. The ‘Statements of Objections’ was sent more than two years after the investigation was first opened against these companies. Valve provides "activation keys" to these video game publishers which are required for consumers to play PC video games bought on channels other than Steam. However, Valve and the five PC video game publishers are accused of forming a bilateral partnership to prevent consumers from purchasing and using PC video games acquired elsewhere than in their country of residence. This is against EU antitrust rules and violates Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union via Regulation 2018/302, which prohibits geo-blocking. Valve is accused of blocking cross-border sales of PC games in countries, including Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Romania. EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said: "In a true Digital Single Market, European consumers should have the right to buy and play video games of their choice regardless of where they live in the EU. Consumers should not be prevented from shopping around between the Member States to find the best available deal. Valve and the five PC video game publishers now have the chance to respond to our concerns." EU said it can "adopt a decision prohibiting the conduct and imposing a fine of up to 10% of a company's annual worldwide turnover" if it "concludes that there is sufficient evidence of infringement." In a statement, Valve told Venture Beat, that while it has indeed worked with game publishers to implement region locks, these are not related to sales made through its Steam store. A spokesperson for Valve, Doug Lombardi, said, "The EC's charges do not relate to the sale of PC games on Steam. Instead, the EC alleges that Valve enabled geo-blocking by providing Steam activation keys and—upon the publishers' requests—locking those keys to particular territories within the EEA". Valve further explained: The region locks only applied to a small number of game titles. Approximately just 3 percent of all games using Steam -- and none of Valve's own games -- at the time were subject to the contested region locks in the EEA. Valve believes that the EC's extension of liability to a platform provider in these circumstances is not supported by applicable law. Nonetheless, because of the EC's concerns, Valve actually turned off region locks within the EEA starting in 2015, unless those region locks were necessary for local legal requirements. Such as German content laws or geographic limits on where the Steam partner is licensed to distribute a game. Koch Media claimed the proceedings date back to business performed before 2015 in a public statement. They said, “Koch Media will monitor the process closely and is fully committed to complying with all rules and regulations." Valve’s multitude of online defenders opposed the EU’s decision considering, uniform prices may leave developers in a tricky position when it comes to finding the ideal price point. In a Hacker News thread, people wrote down their views: “But now think about the consequences of this: everybody in the EU has to pay the same price for the games. There's an income difference of 5-10 times between different EU countries. The poorest ones will have to now pay the same price as the richest ones. A game costing >€60 when you have less than €300 disposable income per month is crazy expensive.” “Why would everyone have to pay the same price for games? Where does this logic come from? The EU doesn't force you to price thing the same across all countries. But you are just not allowed to ban people from buying a thing in one EU country and take it to another - this is the CORE tenement of EU's single market and without this limitation, the EU single market cannot exist.” Seeing the EU’s allegations, Valve will most probably stop all these practices in the EU, but continue to make profits elsewhere in the world.  On Hacker News, a user wrote down Valve's response, “Basically, they don't agree with it, but stopped doing it years ago since they knew the EU was going to give them problems with it. They also said that it only applied to physical copies of games that included a code to redeem on steam, so they weren't making any money off of this, and it was only done at the request of some publishers.” Valve plans to bring new events system and store discoverability feature to Steam this year. Fortnite creator Epic games launch Epic games store where developers get 88% of revenue earned; challenging Valve’s dominance. Valve’s Steam Play Beta uses Proton, a modified WINE, allowing Linux gamers to play Windows games.

Epic Games, an American video game and software development company, made a series of announcements, earlier this week. These include: Epic Game’s CEO, Tim Sweeney to offer $100 million in grants to game developers Stunning RTX-powered Ray-Tracing Demo named Troll Epic’s free Online Services launch for game developers Epic MegaGrants: $100 million funds to Game Developers Tim Sweeney, CEO, Epic Games Inc, announced earlier this week that he will be offering $100 million in grants to game developers to boost the growth of the gaming industry. Sweeney made the announcement during a presentation on Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). GDC is the world's largest professional game industry event that ended yesterday in San Francisco. Epic Games also created a $5 million fund for grants that have been disbursed over the last three years. Now Epic Games is off to build a new fund called Epic MegaGrants. These are “no-strings-attached” grants, meaning that they don’t consist of any contracts requiring game developers to do anything for Epic. All that game developers need to do is apply for the grants, create an innovative project, and if the Epic’s judges find it worthy, they’ll offer them the funds. “There are no commercial hooks back to Epic. You don’t have to commit to any deliverables. This is our way of sharing Fortnite’s unbelievable success with as many developers as we can”, said Sweeney. Troll: a Ray Tracing Unreal Engine 4 Demo Another eye-grabbing moment at GDC this year was a “visually stunning” ray tracing demo revealed by Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films called "Troll”. Troll was rendered in real time using Unreal Engine 4.22 ray tracing and camera effects. And powered by a NVIDIA’s single GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card.  Troll is visually inspired by Swedish painter and illustrator John Bauer, whose illustrations are famous for Swedish folklore and fairy tales anthology known as ‘Among Gnomes and Trolls’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjt_MqEOcGM                                                            Troll “Ray tracing is more than just reflections — it’s about all the subtle lighting interactions needed to create a natural, beautiful image. Ray tracing adds these subtle lighting effects throughout the scene, making everything look more real and natural,” said Nick Penwarden, Director of Engineering for Unreal Engine at Epic Games. NVIDIA team states in a blog post that Epic Games has been working to integrate RTX-accelerated ray tracing into its popular Unreal Engine 4. In fact, Unreal Engine 4.22 will have the support for new Microsoft DXR API for real-time ray tracing. Epic’s free online services launch for game developers Epic Games also announced the launch of free tools and services, part of the Epic Online Services, which was announced in December 2018. The SDK is available via the new developer portal for immediate download and use. SDK currently supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. Moreover, the SDK, as a part of the release, provides support for two free services, namely, game analytics and player ticketing. Game analytics help developers understand player behavior. It features DAU (Daily active users), MAU (Monthly active users), retention, new player counts, game launch counts, online user count, and more. The ticketing system connects players directly with developers and allows them to report bugs or other problems. These two services will continue to evolve along with the rest of Epic Online Services (EOS) to offer infrastructure and tools required by the developers to launch, operate, and scale the high-quality online games. Epic games will also be offering additional free services throughout 2019, including player data storage, player reports, leaderboards & stats, player identity, player inventory, matchmaking etc. “We are committed to developing EOS with features that can be used with any engine, any store and that can support any major platform...these services will allow developers to deliver cross-platform gameplay experiences that enable players to enjoy games no matter what platform they play on”, states the Epic Games team. Fortnite server suffered a minor outage, Epic Games was quick to address the issue Epic games CEO calls Google “irresponsible” for disclosing the security flaw in Fortnite Android installer Fortnite creator Epic games launch Epic games store where developers get 88% of revenue earned

NVIDIA launched a ‘recommended router’ program last week to improve the overall experience of its GeForce Now (GFN) cloud gaming service for PC and Mac. The GeForce NOW game-streaming service has transformed the user experience when it comes to playing high-performance games. NVIDIA has now come out with a few enhancements in beta mode to improve the quality of its service, using its ‘recommended router program’. The recommended router program comes comprises the latest generation routers for cloud-gaming in the home for video streaming and downloading. These routers enable the users to configure its settings in a way that it prioritizes GeForce NOW over all the other data. Recommended routers get certified as “factory-enabled” with a GeForce NOW “quality of service (QoS) profile” that makes sure that your cloud game playing is at its best quality. The router settings get automatically loaded once the GeForce Now launches. Network latency which is the biggest drawback on cloud gaming is quite low with these routers and also better streaming speeds are offered for GeForce NOW. “We’re working closely with ASUS, D-LINK, Netgear, Razer, TP-Link, Ubiquiti Networks and other router manufacturers to build GeForce NOW recommended routers. They’re committed to building best-in-class cloud gaming routers — just as we’re committed to delivering best-in-class gaming experiences,” says the NVIDIA team. GFN recommended routers are now available in the U.S. and Canada starting with Amplifi HD Gamer’s Edition by Ubiquiti Networks. Amplifi makes use of multiple self-configuring radios and advanced antenna technology that helps it deliver a powerful, whole-home Wi-Fi coverage. For more information, read the official NVIDIA blog. NVIDIA demos a style-based generative adversarial network that can generate extremely realistic images; has ML community enthralled NVIDIA makes its new “brain for autonomous AI machines”, Jetson AGX Xavier Module, available for purchase NVIDIA open sources its game physics simulation engine, PhysX, and unveils PhysX SDK 4.0

Last week, the Molly Rocket team released a high-speed hash function called Meow hash. It is named after the character Meow in the game Meow the Infinite. Meow the Infinite is a fun little game in which a cat runs infinitely and tries to save its life from dogs and other obstacles. The new hash function will be used in the asset pipeline of 1935, a historical fiction game about the criminal underworld of New York City in the 1930s. Why Meow Hash is developed? Building game packages demand a faster, non-cryptographic hash for use in change detection and deduplication. Earlier, the Molly Rocket team relied on SHA-1, which was unnecessarily slowing things down. Also, they did not find a well-optimized, large-data hash function to address their game development needs. Currently, most of the hash work seems to focus on small input sizes or on cryptographic quality. Instead of focusing on the cryptographic quality, this hash function focuses on speed, large datasets, and is collision-free in practice. How fast and robust it is? Meow hash hashes 16 bytes per cycle single-threaded. It hashes at a rate of 64 gigabytes per second on a 4.2 GHz machine in the cache. Out of cache, it can hash at whatever speed your main memory bus can provide to a single core since that is usually the limiting factor on modern x64 CPUs. But actually, hashing 16 bytes per cycle is the lower bound for Meow hash. In future, once the VAES debuts, it would be able to hash 64 bytes every cycle in the cache for a clean 4x speedup. Talking about its robustness, it is extremely robust for its designed purpose. It was able to pass every test in smhasher without any collisions on their large datasets. It produces a full 512 bits of usable hash every time. It also passed smhasher cleanly at every truncation level down to 32 bits, so you can safely truncate a Meow hash value to the size you want to store. Also, one thing to note here is it is not designed for cryptography, so it is completely insecure. You can read more about Meow hash on the official website of Molly Rocket. Also, check out its GitHub repository. HashiCorp announces Consul 1.2 to ease Service segmentation with the Connect feature Django 2.1.2 fixes major security flaw that reveals password hash to “view only” admin users Say hello to Sequoia: a new Rust based OpenPGP library to secure your apps

Unity has released a benchmarking report after two years since the last Unity Benchmark report comparing the performance and load times of WebAssembly with asm.js. They have compared the performance of Unity WebGL in four major web browsers: Firefox 61, Chrome 70, Safari 11.1.2 and Edge 17.  Last month, Unity officially announced that it is finally making the switch to WebAssembly as their output format for the Unity WebGL build target. Note: All images and graphs are taken from the Unity Blog. For running the tests, the team rebuilt the Benchmark project with Unity 2018.2.5f1 using the following Unity WebGL Player Settings: Here are the findings from the report. Criteria 1: Total amount of time taken to get to the main screen for both WebAssembly and asm.js. Findings: Firefox is comparatively fast to load on both Windows and macOS Chrome and Edge load faster when using WebAssembly All browsers, except Safari, load faster with WebAssembly compared to asm.js. Criteria 2: In-Depth Load Times for WebAssembly-only. The team compared four factors: WebAssembly compilation and instantiation. Unity engine initialization and first scene load. Time it takes to render first frame. Time it takes to load and have a stable frame-rate. Findings: Firefox is the fastest overall on both Windows and Mac Edge compiles Wasm quickly (even faster than Firefox) but is slower in Unity engine initialization. Criteria 3: Performance and Load times for Real-World Projects Real-world projects result in larger builds which impact the end-user’s experience. Here is an overview of total scores using WebAssembly and asm.js Findings: All browsers perform better when using WebAssembly On Windows, all browsers perform similarly On macOS, Firefox outperforms all other browsers. Safari is the browser that benefits the most by WebAssembly since it doesn’t support asm.js optimizations. Conclusion The report findings conclude that modern browsers load faster and perform better thanks to WebAssembly. It also provides more consistent user experience as compared to asm.js. Read more about the findings on the Unity Blog. Unity releases ML-Agents toolkit v0.5 with Gym interface, a new suite of learning environments. Key Takeaways from the Unity Game Studio Report 2018. Unity switches to WebAssembly as the output format for the Unity WebGL build target.  

AMD has made V-EZ, the Vulkan wrapper library open source. The V-EZ wrapper is C based lightweight layer around Vulkan which reduces the complexity of using the Vulkan API. It abstracts away the lower level complexities of the Vulkan API. It also reduces differences between traditional graphics APIs and Vulkan by providing similar semantics to Vulkan. V-EZ is basically designed to increase the adoption of Vulkan in the gaming industry. It provides game developers with all the modern graphics API features without all of the low-level responsibilities. The low-level Vulkan API features abstracted in V-EZ include: Memory management Swapchain management Render Passes Pipeline permutations, layouts, and barriers Descriptor pools, sets, and set layouts Image layouts GLSL compilation Vulkan API objects and their interactions V-EZ has only a slight performance overhead as compared to native Vulkan APIs and offers most Vulkan API features including Batching queue submissions Multi-threaded command buffer recording Reusing command buffers Minimizing pipeline bindings Minimizing resource bindings Batching draw calls As mentioned on their Github repo, V-EZ is not hardware vendor specific and should work on non-AMD hardware as well. For building V-EZ you can follow these instructions: Run cmake to generate Visual Studio solution files or Linux make files. No specific settings need to be set. Pull down submodules git submodule init git submodule update Build V-EZ project. Reddit is abuzz with discussion on whether Vulkan is right to be advertised as a general replacement to OpenGL. Some said that Vulkan is a viable replacement to OpenGL but only at a lower level. A lot of the logic that openGL drivers take care of internally are exposed in the Vulkan API to allow for more optimization and performance focused coding. It's a lower level replacement. Most of of the code deals with stuff like GPU memory allocation, command buffering, synchronisation, and other such low-level concerns that, AFAIK, OpenGL doesn't let you touch. Some said Vulkan only stands out when you build games. I see indie game developers who are writing their own games without an existing engine would benefit greatly from higher abstractions of Vulkan, like this V-EZ project. They will get most of the performance improvements of Vulkan without a lot of the complexity. And in some cases the Vulkan abstraction is easier to understand and reason about than the OpenGL equivalent. Most people shouldn't use Vulkan directly. They should use a graphics library that would deal with the low level stuff. Only people making game engines and graphics libraries have to use low level Vulkan API and for those purposes Vulkan is superior. You can follow the entire Reddit thread for other comments. Also, see the Github repo for more details on V-EZ open sourcing. Think Silicon open sources GLOVE: An OpenGL ES over Vulkan middleware. Debugging in Vulkan.

Minecraft Server Java Edition has added a new (spigot) plugin which changes climate mechanics in the game. This plugin adds the concept of greenhouse gases (CO2) in the game world's atmosphere. According to a recent report, only 45 percent of Americans think that global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime, and just 43 percent say they worry about climate change. These figures are alarming because serious damages due to Global Warming are imminent. As such, games and other forms of entertainment services are a good approach to change these ideologies and make people aware of how serious the threat of Global warming is. Minecraft’s approach could not only spread awareness but also has the potential to develop personal accountability and healthy personal habits. What does the Minecraft plugin do? The Furnaces within the game emit CO2 when players smelt items. Every furnace burn causes a Contribution to emissions with an associated numerical value. The trees are designed to instantly absorb CO2 when they grow from a sapling. Every tree growth causes a Reduction from emissions with an associated numerical value. As CO2 levels rise, the global temperature of the game environment will also rise because of the Greenhouse Effect. The global temperature is a function of the net global carbon score. As the global temperature rises, the frequency and severity of negative climate damages increases. Players need to design a default model that doesn't quickly destroy worlds. Players are best off when they cooperate and agree to reduce their emissions. What are its features? Scoreboard and Economy Integration Carbon Scorecard, where each player can see their latest carbon footprint trends via command line. Custom Models, with configurable thresholds, probabilities, and distributions. Load data on startup, queue DB changes to be done asynchronously and at intervals, and empty queue on shutdown. How was the response? The new Minecraft plugin received mixed reviews. Some considered it a great idea for teaching in schools. “Global warming is such an abstract problem and if you can tie it to individual's behaviors inside a (small) simulated world, it can be a very powerful teaching tool.” Others were not as happy. People feel that Minecraft lacks the basic principle of conservation of matter and energy, which is where you start with ecology. As a hacker news user pointed out, “I wish there was a game which would get the physical foundations right so that the ecology could be put on as a topping. What I imagine is something like a Civilization, where each map cell would be like 1 km2 and you could define what industries would be in that cell (perhaps even design the content of each cell). Each cell would contain a little piece of civilization and/or nature. These cells would then exchange different materials with each other, according to conservation laws.” While there will always be room for improvement, we think Minecraft is setting the tone for what could become a movement within the gaming community to bring critical abstract ideas to players in a non-threatening and thought-provoking way. The gaming industry has always lead technological innovations that then further cascade to other industries. We are excited to see this new real-world dimension becoming a focus area for Minecraft. You can read more about the Minecraft Plugin on its Github repo. Building a portable Minecraft server for LAN parties in the park Minecraft: The Programmer’s Sandbox Minecraft Modding Experiences and Starter Advice

With the launch of Unity 2018.2 release last month, Unity is finally making the switch to WebAssembly as their output format for the Unity WebGL build target. WebAssembly support was first teased in Unity 5.6 as an experimental feature. Unity 2018.1 marked the removal of the experimental label. And finally in 2018.2, Web Assembly replaces asm.js as the default linker target. Source: Unity Blog WebAssembly replaced asm.js because it is faster, smaller and more memory-efficient, which are all pain points of the Unity WebGL export. A WebAssembly file is a binary file (which is a more compact way to deliver code), as opposed to asm.js, which is text. In addition, code modules that have already been compiled can be stored into an IndexedDB cache, resulting in a really fast startup when reloading the same content. In WebAssembly, the code size for an empty project is ~12% smaller or ~18% if 3D physics is included. Source: Unity Blog WebAssembly also has its own instruction set. In Development builds, it adds more precise error-detection in arithmetic operations. In non-development builds, this kind of detection of arithmetic errors is masked, so the user experience is not affected. Asm.js added a restriction on the size of the Unity Heap; its size had to be specified at build-time and could never change. WebAssembly enables the Unity Heap size to grow at runtime, which lets Unity content memory-usage exceed the initial heap size. Unity is now working on multi-threading support, which will initially be released as an experimental feature and will be limited to internal native threads (no C# threads yet). Debugging hasn’t got any better. While browsers have begun to provide WebAssembly debugging in their devtools suites, these debuggers do not yet scale well to Unity3D sizes of content. What’s next to come Unity is still working on new features and optimizations to improve startup times and performance: Asynchronous instantiation Structured cloning, which allows compiled WebAssembly to be cached in the browser Baseline and tiered compilation, to speed-up instantiation Streaming instantiation to compile Assembly code while downloading it Multi-Threading You can read the full details on the Unity Blog. Unity 2018.2: Unity release for this year second time in a row! GitHub for Unity 1.0 is here with Git LFS and file locking support What you should know about Unity 2018 Interface