Tech News - 3D Game Development

Corona Labs announced yesterday that it’s making its free and cross-platform 2D game engine, Corona, available as open source under the GPLv3 license and commercial licenses. The license for builds and releases remains unchanged and the change applies only to the source code of the engine. Corona is a popular game engine for creating 2D games and apps for mobile, desktop systems, TV platforms, and the web. It is based on Lua language and makes use of over 1,000 built-in APIs and plugins, and Corona Native extensions (C/C++/Obj-C/Java). According to Vlad Sherban, product manager for Corona Labs, the Corona team had been discussing making Corona open source ever since it got acquired by Appodeal, back in 2017. “We believe that this move will bring transparency to the development process, and will allow users to contribute features or bug fixes to make the project better for everyone,” said Sherban. The team also mentions that transitioning to open source would help them respond quickly to market shifts and changes. It would also ensure that Corona stays relevant at all times for all mobile app developers. Moreover, now that Corona is open source, it will bring more visibility to the development process by letting users see what the engine team is working on and where the project is going. It will also offer extra benefits for businesses as they will be able to acquire a commercial license for source code and customize the engine for certain commercial projects. Additionally, Corona Labs won’t be collecting any statistics from apps built with daily build 2018.3454 or later. When Corona Labs was a closed source product, it used to collect basic app usage stats such as the number of sessions, daily average users, etc. With Corona available as open source now, there is no need to collect this data. “Powered by the new open source model and supported by the development of new features and bug fixes will make Corona more community driven — but not without our help and guidance --- going open source will provide confidence in the future of the engine and an opportunity to grow community involvement in engine development,” said Sherban. NVIDIA open sources its game physics simulation engine, PhysX, and unveils PhysX SDK 4.0 Microsoft open sources Trill, a streaming engine that employs algorithms to process “a trillion events per day” Facebook contributes to MLPerf and open sources Mask R-CNN2Go, its CV framework for embedded and mobile devices

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

The 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

Microsoft is reportedly planning to bring Xbox Live cross-platform gaming features to PC, Xbox, iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch. This news was first reported by Windows Central via a GDC 2019 schedule on Xbox Live. “Xbox Live is expanding from 400 million gaming devices and a reach to over 68 million active players to over 2 billion devices with the release of our new cross-platform XDK,” says the GDC listing. The GDC session will also offer a first look at the SDK to enable game developers to connect players between iOS, Android, and Switch in addition to Xbox and any game in the Microsoft Store on Windows PCs. Until now, Microsoft has reserved Xbox Live support on iOS, Android, and Nintendo Switch platforms for its own games, but now, Microsoft is aiming to bring Xbox Live integration to even more gaming titles. This is a part of Microsoft’s gaming mission to bring software, services, and games to players on other platforms aside from its traditional PC and Xbox markets. Per Windows central, “Developers will be able to bake cross-platform Xbox Live achievements, social systems, and multiplayer, into games built for mobile devices and Nintendo Switch, as part of its division-wide effort to grow Xbox Live's user base.” For developers, this would mean allowing “communities to mingle more freely across platforms. Combined with PlayFab gaming services, this means less work for game developers and more time to focus on making games fun,” says the GDC listing. Microsoft is also building a xCloud game streaming service that will stream Xbox games to PCs, consoles, and mobile devices later this year. Twitter users are fairly excited about this news. https://twitter.com/Avers_G4GMedia/status/1091623967088144384 https://twitter.com/NintendoSwitchC/status/1092560268956233728 https://twitter.com/TannithArt/status/1092675726996844544 Microsoft announces Project xCloud, a new Xbox game streaming service. Epic games CEO calls Google “irresponsible” for disclosing the security flaw in Fortnite Android Microsoft plans to use Windows ML for Game development

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

Last week, a lot of drama had been going between Improbable and Unity, when Unity updated their TOS Clause 2.4 to restrict developers who planned to use Unity in any kind of distributed network capacity. Yesterday, in a blog post Unity improved on their  End User License Agreement to make it more open for developers. Per this new update, developers can now use any third party service that integrate into Unity. However, the choice of support of this service remains with Unity. Basically, Unity will integrate their own services, but not block developers from using competitive third-party services. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]Unity TOS Section 2.4 Unity developers are free to use any service offered to Unity developers (each, a “Third Party Service”).  Unity does not have any obligation to provide support for any Third Party Service provider or Third Party Service under this Agreement. Third Party Service providers may not, without Unity’s express written permission: (1) use a stylized version of any Unity name, trademark, logos, images or product icons, or other Unity-owned graphic symbols; (2) use a product name confusingly similar to a Unity product or that could be construed by Unity developers as being a Unity product or service; or (3) create or use any marketing materials that suggest an affiliation with, or endorsement by, Unity.  All use of Unity’s trademarks must comply with Unity’s Trademark Guidelines.[/box] Unity has also shared updates on their relationship with Improbable and has clarified that Improbable or SpatialOS is no longer blocked on their licenses and can be used for development and shipping games. “Improbable is no longer in breach by providing you a service, and that we are able to reinstate their licenses. But we do not consider them a partner, and cannot vouch for how their service works with Unity as we have no insight into their technology or how they run their business.”, they clarified in a blog post. Unity’s news has been taken positively by the developer community. Here are a few comments from a thread on hacker news. “Good move on their part, but the whole saga is a reminder of the risks of using non-free software, especially if it's a subscription. At any point, the developers can pull the rug out from under you.” “I've been following this rather closely as a company who provides backend services (so we're classified as a 3rd party service) to studios in the industry, many of whom use Unity. I'm rather surprised by this about-face, especially considering Unity had the upper hand in negotiations with Improbable. A pleasant surprise, and a much-needed one in the games industry where locked-down tech is often the norm.” Improbable says Unity blocked SpatialOS; Unity responds saying it has shut down Improbable and not Spatial OS Unity and Baidu collaborate for simulating the development of autonomous vehicles Unity 2018.3 is here with improved Prefab workflows, Visual Effect graph and more

Game publisher Activision-Blizzard announced that it will lay off 8% of its staff of 9,600 employees. This announcement was made during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday. A total of nearly 800 employees, that will be laid off will mostly belong to non-game development and administrative areas of the company. CEO of Activision-Blizzard Bobby Kotick said, “The move is being made in an effort at de-prioritizing initiatives that are not meeting expectations and reducing certain non-development and administrative-related costs across the business." The company is undergoing restructuring because of missed expectations for 2018 and lowered expectations for 2019. It will boost up the numbers of employees in the development team of its franchises like Call of Duty and Diablo. In a note to its staff obtained by Kotaku, Blizzard, president J. Allen Brack said, “Currently staffing levels on some teams are out of proportion with our current release slate. This means we need to scale down some areas of our organization. I’m sorry to share that we will be parting ways with some of our colleagues in the U.S. today.” The letter also promised “a comprehensive severance package”, says Kotaku. It will include continued health benefits, career coaching, and job placement assistance as well as profit-sharing bonuses for the previous year to those who are being laid off at Blizzard. In the official press release on Blizzard's website, Brack said Blizzard is dedicated to bringing their unannounced projects to life. They will focus heavily on Esports and the Overwatch League, which is their biggest esports brand. Twitterati is highly disappointed with this news and is sympathetic towards dismissed employees. https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1095374774728048640 https://twitter.com/hitstreak/status/1095456359594610689 https://twitter.com/day9tv/status/1095390958584131584 Other organizations are also offering job opportunities to those in need. https://twitter.com/ScottLowe/status/1094052545297711104   https://twitter.com/MitchyD/status/1094061851804078082 Instacart changes its “tips stealing” policy after facing workers backlash Per the new GDC 2019 report, nearly 50% of game developers think game industry workers should unionize Tech Workers Coalition volunteers talk unionization and solidarity in Silicon Valley

Think Silicon, a firm that delivers ultra-low power graphics IP technology recently open sourced  GLOVE (GL Over Vulkan). GLOVE, a middleware allows Android, Linux, and Windows OS developers to seamlessly run OpenGL ES on supported hardware by translating OpenGL ES API calls to Vulkan API commands at runtime. Why GLOVE (GL Over Vulkan)? OpenGL and OpenGL ES are the most widely used standards for the development of graphics-based applications. Increased complexity of driver's implementation based on OpenGL and OpenGL ES led to the introduction of Vulkan (a lower-level API that transfers much of the driver's functionality to the application-side). However, in most situations, a direct transition to Vulkan requires additional efforts by the developers and vendors. This means they are forced to maintain driver support for both Vulkan and OpenGL. With the introduction of GLOVE, developers can seamlessly transition their software between both Vulkan and OpenGL APIs. Following this, vendors are able to discard duplicate OpenGL ES drivers and rely solely on a lighter implementation of the Vulkan API. Additional features of GLOVE GLOVE allows running OpenGL ES calls not only on Android and Linux systems but also on Windows operating systems, which was not possible before. It also offers the possibility to run legacy applications and games on top of Vulkan at a glance. This saves a lot of effort and provides backward compatibility. It allows you to quickly explore Vulkan driver capabilities and performance by using existing OpenGL ES code. Its modular design can be easily extended to encompass implementations of other client APIs as well. Dimitris Georgakakis, Team Lead, Graphics Software Stack, Think Silico said, "We are excited to release GLOVE™ as Open Source Project to the graphics developer community and we will continue our efforts to support more platforms and features to ensure GLOVE™ can be useful in a lot of use cases.” Read more about GLOVE (GL Over Vulkan) on ThinkSilicon release notes. Implementing Unity 2017 Game Audio [Tutorial] Unity assets to create interactive 2D games [Tutorial]

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

This week, Unity Technologies, the real-time 3D development platform creator, announced its collaboration with Baidu Inc., China's leading Internet giant for developing a real-time simulation product that creates virtual environments while allowing developers to test autonomous vehicles in real-world situations. This real-time simulation will be available for developers taking part in Baidu’s Apollo platform-- an open and reliable platform working towards the development, testing, and deployment of Levels 3, 4, 5 autonomous vehicles. It includes all the different areas of the self-driving technology spectrum, right from perception and localization to 3D simulation and end-to-end training and testing of autonomous vehicles. The collaboration between Baidu and Unity is expected to gear up the development of a simulation environment for testing autonomous driving software. This simulation will enable developers to digitalize the entire development process. There are advantages of using simulations and virtual environment in development and testing. For instance, risky or implausible scenarios can be generated and tested in simulation whereas it might be impossible to do the same in the real world. Moreover, dangerous situations which can’t be tested in real life can be created and tested using such a simulation. “The ability to accurately conduct autonomous testing in a simulated environment allows for millions of simulations to simultaneously occur, providing Apollo partners with a competitive advantage while helping to keep their business costs down,” said Tim McDonough, general manager of Industrial, Unity Technologies. Unity’s real-time 3D platform helps in reducing errors and risks while increasing efficiency and speed of testing by offering simulations that replicate real-world scenarios. Apart from Baidu, Unity also works the largest OEMs in the world by improving the way they design, build, service and sell automobiles. The company has experts from companies such as BMW,  Toyota, General Motors, Volvo, and the Volkswagen Group. Unity also recently launched SimViz Solution Template, a package that provides OEMs and helps in the building of simulation environments. Jaewon Jung, Chief Architect of Baidu’s Intelligent Driving Group said, “By using a platform like Unity, our developers can focus on testing and research without worrying about non-functional environments or building something from scratch. The Unity-powered game engine simulation for Apollo has the ability to expedite autonomous vehicle validation and training with precise ground truth data in a more effective and safer way.” It would be interesting to see how this collaboration accelerates Baidu’s development of autonomous driving software. Read more about this news, check out Business Wire’ post. Unity ML-Agents Toolkit v0.6 gets two updates: improved usability of Brains and workflow for Imitation Learning Unity 2018.3 is here with improved Prefab workflows, Visual Effect graph and more Unity introduces guiding Principles for ethical AI to promote responsible use of AI

Xenko, a game engine owned by Silicon Studios has officially released its third version on August 2. The major change in Xenko 3.0 is the transition to being open-source. It also comes with changes made to the project system and added support for videos as well as hair, and skin rendering. Open-source and support Although Xenko won’t be supported officially anymore by Silicon Studios, the members of the Xenko development team will continue contributing to it. Virgile Bello, Lead Developer at Xenko Game Engine stated that he will personally work on it fulltime for the next couple of months in the official blog. The new version is released under the MIT License on Github. It is well received by the open source community. The Xenko repository has already gained almost 700 stars and a couple of issues showing active involvement. Changes in the Xenko 3.0 game engine Other than the open-source transition, there are a few other changes in the engine itself. Xenko 3.0 has made the switch to the new C# project system, which makes your game csproj as simple as a PackageReference to Xenko. This makes package management more convenient. It is now also possible to add video to your games with the latest release. This feature is not completely tested on all platforms so you may run into issues while implementing it. Hair and skin rendering support are also added, but like videos, this feature may need some improvements and tuning. The package names have also been changed since the move to open-source. The SiliconStudio.Xenko package is now Xenko. Also the SiliconStudio.Core and SiliconStudio.* packages are now Xenko.Core. Your earlier projects should automatically be updated but a backup before the upgrade is recommended. Virgile has set up a Patreon page if you’d like to support the project financially. The release notes state that the future plan is to split Xenko further into separate packages such as Xenko.Graphics, Xenko.Physics and Xenko.Editor. These are only the major changes. For the complete changelog and other minor updates in Xenko 3.0, you can see the Release Notes. Think Silicon open sources GLOVE: An OpenGL ES over Vulkan middleware Working with shaders in C++ to create 3D games Unity assets to create interactive 2D games [Tutorial]

Yesterday, many Fortnite players reported long queues for matches and timeouts while trying to play the game. The Fortnite outage happened during the holiday season. https://twitter.com/Soldier_Dimitri/status/1078029461461913614 Epic games knew about this issue and tweeted that an investigation is underway to find the cause of the timeouts and slowdowns when some users were trying to log in and play. Epic had told the players to check the status on their website. https://twitter.com/FortniteGame/status/1078027774034657282 TechCrunch noted this Fortnite outage and was able to replicate it. The game was continuously held for about five minutes and then timed out. Epic games reported a “minor service outage” that affected game services. Within three hours of acknowledging, Epic games also issued a fix for the issue and let the users know on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FortniteGame/status/1078065448585965568 A member from Epic Games explained the reason for the Fortnite outage on Reddit: “Quick summary is that deploying a fix for elf challenge reward not being granted exposed a latent bug in our profile migration code (the code that fixes up players). This caused players to be kicked etc and triggered our waiting room. We fixed the issue and deployed a new backend, however, didn’t see a recovery in login success. This ended up due to “sticky session” configuration having been lost on our waiting room load balances when moving them to ALBs. This meant that there was a 90% chance of having to requeue after hitting the front of the line. D’oh. This should all be fixed now and we are seeing a recovery in numbers/login throughout / waiting room / etc.” Gamers have appreciated the company’s transparency in letting users know about what happened: “As a company, I applaud you for your transparency. It is highly unusual and I hope you continue to set precedence in this industry.” Fortnite creator Epic games launch Epic games store where developers get 88% of revenue earned; challenging Valve’s dominance Epic games CEO calls Google “irresponsible” for disclosing the security flaw in Fortnite Android Installer before patch was ready Google is missing out $50 million because of Fortnite’s decision to bypass Play Store

A fresh drama has emerged between Unity and Improbable. According to yesterday’s blog post by the SpatialOS creator, Improbable says that Unity has blocked SpatialOS based on a recent change in Unity’s terms of service (clause 2.4). Unity has contested this stating Improbable's blog post was misleading and added that they have terminated their relationship with Improbable without affecting anyone using SpatialOS. What did Improbable say? Unity had updated their terms of service on Dec 5 and then informed Improbable directly on Jan 9 that their service has been revoked on the Unity’s game engine. Per the blog, “all existing SpatialOS games using Unity, including production games and in development games of all developers, are now in breach of Unity’s license terms.” The blog also states that Unity has put a stop for Improbable to continue working with the Unity engine, affecting their ability to support games. The blog post disapproved Unity’s decision stating that Unity’s actions have done harm to projects across the industry, especially affecting vulnerable or small scale developers. Moreover, this is a threat to games that have been funded based on the promise of SpatialOS to deliver next-generation multiplayer as their choice of game engine. The improbable team has also stated that going further they would be helping developers using SpatialOS with Unity to finish, release and operate their games and set up an emergency fund. They are also fully open-sourcing the code of SpatialOS Game Development Kit for Unity, under the MIT license. How did Unity respond? Unity has termed Improbable's blog as ‘incorrect’ stating that they have “terminated their relationship with Improbable due to a failed negotiation with them after they violated Unity’s Terms of Service. However, anyone using SpatialOS will not be affected.” Unity also assures that even if a game developer runs a Unity-based game server on their own servers or generic cloud instances (like GCP, AWS or Azure), they are covered by Unity’s EULA. “From a technical standpoint, this is what our clarification on our TOS means: if you want to run your Unity-based game-server, on your own servers, or a cloud provider that provides you instances to run your own server for your game, you are covered by our EULA. We will support you as long as the server is running on a Unity supported platform.” Unity blocked Improbable because the company was making unauthorized and improper use of Unity’s technology and name in connection with the development, sale, and marketing of its own products. Early last year, they informed Improbable in person that they were in violation of Unity’s Terms of Service. Then, after six months, Unity informed Improbable about the violation in writing. Seeing no changes, Unity decided to take strict action by turning off Improbable’s Unity Editor license keys, about two weeks ago. Unity says they are trying to resolve the dispute with Improbable without affecting developers. SpatialOS Developers will receive support for any outstanding questions or issues directly at support@unity3d.com. What about Unity’s TOS Clause 2.4? Unity’s updated clause states that they are prohibiting "streaming or broadcasting so that any portion of the Unity Software is primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet or other networks to end user devices..." This is alarming for Unity asset and service providers and developers. As explained by a gamedev.net user, this could mean that “any kind of processing offload for entity state occurring on a server or cloud provider (such as SpatialOS) is no longer allowed. As such, developers who planned to use Unity in any kind of distributed network capacity may find themselves in a difficult situation.” The creator of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has reacted harshly to this clause as well. "We specifically make the UE4 EULA apply perpetually so that when you obtain a version under a given EULA, you can stay on that version and operate under that EULA forever if you choose." https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1083407460252217346 This battle has definitely added a boost to Unreal Engine’s popularity. https://twitter.com/patrickol/status/1083476747700576256 https://twitter.com/hippowombat/status/1083581963422691329 Epic Games have also said that it has partnered with Improbable to establish a $25 million fund to "assist developers who are left in limbo by the new engine and service incompatibilities that were introduced." Unity and Baidu collaborate for simulating the development of autonomous vehicles Unity 2018.3 is here with improved Prefab workflows, Visual Effect graph and more Unity ML-Agents Toolkit v0.6 gets two updates: improved usability of Brains and workflow for Imitation Learning

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