Tech News - Game Development

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

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

Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella published his letter to shareholders in the company’s 2018 annual report, on LinkedIn yesterday. He talks about Microsoft’s accomplishments in the past year, results and progress of Microsoft’s workplace, business applications, infrastructure, data, AI, and gaming. He also mentioned the data and privacy rules adopted by Microsoft, and their belief to, “ instill trust in technology across everything they do.” Microsoft’s result and progress Data and AI Azure Cosmos DB has already exceeded $100 million in annualized revenue. The company also saw rapid customer adoption of Azure Databricks for data preparation, advanced analytics, and machine learning scenarios. Their Azure Bot Service has nearly 300,000 developers, and they are on the road for building the world’s first AI supercomputer in Azure. Microsoft also acquired GitHub to recognize the increasingly vital role developers will play in value creation and growth across every industry. Business Applications Microsoft’s investments in Power BI have made them the leader in business analytics in the cloud. Their Open Data Initiative with Adobe and SAP will help customers to take control of their data and build new experiences that truly put people at the center. HoloLens and mixed reality will be used for designing for first-line workers, who account for 80 percent of the world’s workforce. New solutions powered by LinkedIn and Microsoft Graphs help companies manage talent, training, and sales and marketing. Applications and Infrastructure Azure revenue grew 91 percent year-over-year and the company is investing aggressively to build Azure as the world’s computer. They added nearly 500 new Azure capabilities in the past year, focused on both existing workloads and new workloads such as IoT and Edge AI. Microsoft expanded their global data center footprint to 54 regions. They introduced Azure IoT and Azure Stack and Azure Sphere. Modern Workplace More than 135 million people use Office 365 commercial every month. Outlook Mobile is also employed on 100 million iOS and Android devices worldwide. Microsoft Teams is being used by more than 300,000 organizations of all sizes, including 87 of the Fortune 100. Windows 10 is active on nearly 700 million devices around the world. Gaming The company surpassed $10 billion in revenue this year for gaming. Xbox Live now has 57 million monthly active users, and they are investing in new services like Mixer and Game Pass. They also added five new gaming studios this year including PlayFab to build a cloud platform for the gaming industry across mobile, PC and console. Microsoft’s impact around the globe Nadella highlighted that companies such as Coca-Cola, Chevron Corporation, ZF Group, a car parts manufacturer in Germany are using Microsoft’s technology to build their own digital capabilities. Walmart is also using Azure and Microsoft 365 for transforming the shopping experience for customers. In Kenya, M-KOPA Solar, one of their partners connected homes across sub-Saharan Africa to solar power using the Microsoft Cloud. Office Dynamics 365 was used in Arizona to improve outcomes among the state’s 15,000 children in foster care. MedApp is using HoloLens in Poland to help cardiologists visualize a patient's heart as it beats in real time. In Cambodia, underserved children in rural communities are learning to code with Minecraft. How Microsoft is handling trust and responsibility Microsoft motto is “instilling trust in technology across everything they do.” Nadella says, “We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right, which is why compliance is deeply embedded in all our processes and practices.” Microsoft has extended the data subject rights of GDPR to all their customers around the world, not just those in the European Union, and advocated for the passage of the CLOUD Act in the U.S. They also led the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, which has been signed by 61 global organizations, and are calling on governments to do more to make the internet safe. They announced the Defending Democracy Program to work with governments around the world to help safeguard voting and introduced AccountGuard to offer advanced cybersecurity protections to political campaigns in the U.S. The company is also investing in tools for detecting and addressing bias in AI systems and advocating government regulation. They are also addressing society's most pressing challenges with new programs like AI for Earth, a five-year, $50M commitment to environmental sustainability, and AI for Accessibility to benefit people with disabilities. Nadella further adds, “Over the past year, we have made progress in building a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can do their best work.” Microsoft has nearly doubled the number of women corporate vice presidents at Microsoft since FY16.  They have also increased African American/Black and Hispanic/Latino representation by 33 percent. He concludes saying that “I’m proud of our progress, and I’m proud of the more than 100,000 Microsoft employees around the world who are focused on our customers’ success in this new era.” Read the full letter on Linkedin. Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, philanthropist, and developer dies of cancer at 65. ‘Employees of Microsoft’ ask Microsoft not to bid on US Military’s Project JEDI in an open letter. Microsoft joins the Open Invention Network community, making 60,000 of its patents accessible to fellow members

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

Once again, we've teamed up with the guys at Humble Bundle to bring game developers - professional, hobbyists, or complete newbies - a huge stash of game development eBooks. In total you can buy $1467 worth of content for just $15! Click here to visit Humble Bundle now. Featuring eBooks and videos on some of the most popular tools in game design and development, we're sure that this is one of our best Bundles yet. From Unity to Blender, we've got useful resources on the software that matters. And with further content on AI and VR, you can also be sure you'll have what you need to learn the trends that are helping to define and drive the industry in 2018. As well as lots of content at incredible prices, you'll also be able to support some incredible organizations. As always, Humble Bundle makes it possible for you to donate a portion of the money you pay to charity. This month its the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who have been doing some exceptional work campaigning for a free and open internet. What you can get in this month's Humble Bundle For just $1 you can bag yourself... Creating a Game with Blender Game Engine [Video] Mastering SFML Game Development Game Physics Cookbook Basics of Coding with Unreal Engine 4 [Video] Beginning C++ Game Programming Three Months of Mapt Pro for $30 Or, you can pay at least $8 to get all that above and... Practical Game AI Programming Modern OpenGL C++ 3D Game Tutorial Series & 3D Rendering [Video] Mastering Unreal Engine 4.x Game Development [Video] Virtual Reality Blueprints Building a Character using Blender 3D [Video] Unity 2017 Mobile Game Development Unity 2017 Game Optimization (Second Edition) Practical Game Design Learning C# 7 By Developing Games with Unity 2017 (Third Edition) Or, you can pay at least $15 to get all of the content above and... Vulkan Cookbook Godot Engine Game Development Projects Swift 3 Game Development (Second Edition) Mastering Unity 2017 Game Development with C# (Second Edition) Getting Started with Unity 2018 (Third Edition) Unity 2017 Game AI Programming (Third Edition) Unity 2017 2D Game Development Projects Unity Virtual Reality Projects (Second Edition) Learning C++ by Creating Games with Unreal Engine 4 [Video] Game Development Patterns and Best Practices Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity    

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.  

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

In their commitment to become the go-to platform for Artificial Intelligence, Unity has released a new version of their ML-Agents Toolkit.  ML-Agents toolkit v0.5 comes with more flexible action specification, a Gym interface for researchers to more easily integrate ML-Agents environments into their training workflows, and a new suite of learning environments replicating some of the Continuous Control benchmarks used in Deep Reinforcement Learning. They have also released a research paper on ML-Agents which the Unity platform has titled “Unity: A General Platform for Intelligent Agent.” Changes to the ML-Agents toolkit v0.5 A lot of changes have been made pertaining to ML-Agents toolkit v0.5. Highlighted changes to repository structure The python folder has been renamed ml-agents. It now contains a python package called mlagents. The unity-environment folder, containing the Unity project, has been renamed UnitySDK. The protobuf definitions used for communication have been added to a new protobuf-definitions folder. Example curricula and the trainer configuration file have been moved to a new config sub-directory. New features New package gym-unity which provides gym interface to wrap UnityEnvironment. The ML-Agents toolkit v0.5 can now run multiple concurrent training sessions with the --num-runs=<n> command line option. Added Meta-Curriculum which supports curriculum learning in multi-brain environments. Action Masking for Discrete Control which makes it possible to mask invalid actions each step to limit the actions an agent can take. Fixes & Performance Improvements Replaced some activation functions to swish. Visual Observations use PNG instead of JPEG to avoid compression losses. Improved python unit tests. Multiple training sessions are available on single GPU. Curriculum lessons are now tracked correctly. Developers can now visualize value estimates when using models trained with PPO from Unity with GetValueEstimate(). It is now possible to specify which camera the Monitor displays to. Console summaries will now be displayed even when running inference mode from python. Minimum supported Unity version is now 2017.4. You can read all about the new version of ML-Agents Toolkit on the Unity Blog. Unity releases ML-Agents v0.3: Imitation Learning, Memory-Enhanced Agents and more. Unity Machine Learning Agents: Transforming Games with Artificial Intelligence. Unite Berlin 2018 Keynote: Unity partners with Google, launches Ml-Agents ToolKit 0.4, Project MARS and more.

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

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.