Beef is an in development programming language designed specifically for games and similar performance critical applications. This comment from Hacker News best sums up the intentions of the BEEF language:
Author here. I’m the engineering co-founder of PopCap Games. I left PopCap after the EA acquisition, and I’ve been working on this project mostly full-time for the last five years.
Before Beef, I was developing game code in C# and engine code in C++ and I felt C# was just much more pleasant to work with – faster compile times, better IDE tooling, better errors, etc. Then it struck me that none of the things I liked about C# really had anything to do with the JIT or the GC, and it may be possible to create a “best of” merging between C# and C++.
I know there are other “C replacement” contenders out there – the differences are probably best explained through Beef’s specific design goals listed at https://www.beeflang.org/docs/foreward/
Beef consists of a complete compiler tool chain built on an LLVM backend, as well as a full IDE with modern features such as refactoring and code completion as well as a complete debugger and profiler. It is available as a small (>100MB) download for Windows, or can be built from sources on Mac and Linux environments.
The Machinery by Our Machinery is a new game engine, currently in beta, by some of the creators of the Stingray/BitSquid game engine. It follows many of the same design prinicipals, being data driven, light weight and extended via a simple C interface. The Machinery is designed from day one to be a framework for creation of your own tools and features, essentially a game engine construction kit.
The Machinery is completely plugin-based. You can pick and choose the parts you need to customize it to your specific needs. You can extend the engine, and the editor, by writing your own plugins. You can even build completely new applications on top of our API, or embed our code into your existing applications or workflows.
Powerful editing model
The Machinery uses a powerful data model to represent edited assets. This model has built-in support for serialization, streaming, copy/paste, drag-and-drop as well as unlimited undo/redo. It supports an advanced hierarchical prefab model for making derivative object instances and propagating changes. It even has full support for real-time collaboration. Multiple people can work together in the same game project, Google Docs-style.
Since all of these features are built into the data model itself, your custom, game-specific data will get them automatically, without you having to write a line of code.
Easy to build tools
The Machinery uses an in-house, lightweight IMGUI framework that sits directly on top of our rendering system. The same UI system is used both by the editor and the runtime, making it possible to run the full editor UI inside a game or in VR. With The Machinery you no longer need watertight boundaries between the editor and the runtime, editing can be done inside the game itself, if you so like.
Using our drawing primitives, it is easy to create custom UI controls. And everything has been heavily optimized to feel snappy and responsive. In fact, the entire editor UI is rendered with just a single draw call.
Modern rendering architecture
The renderer has been designed to take full advantage of modern explicit graphic APIs like Vulkan, DX12 and Metal 2. You can reason explicitly about advanced setups such as multiple GPUs and GPU execution queues. Similar to the rest of the engine, the built-in rendering pipeline is easy to tweak and extend.
High performance
All the code in the engine is built based on data-oriented design principles. We focus on data flows and cache friendly memory layouts. All performance critical code is written to run as jobs, taking full advantage of the parallel processing power of modern CPUs.
Simplicity
The Machinery explicitly aims to be simple, minimalistic and easy to understand. In short, we want to be “hackable”. All our code is written in plain C, a significantly simpler language than modern C++. The entire code base compiles in less than a minute and we support hot-reloading of DLLs, allowing for fast iteration cycles.
Our APIs are exposed as C interfaces, which means they can easily be used from C, C++, D or any other language that has a FFI for calling into C code.
The Machinery is currently in invite only beta, write to them for access. Or you can check out an early build of The Machinery in action in the video below.
Today we are looking at TreeIt, a completely free Windows application for creating game textured and multi-LOD models in just a few seconds. TreeIt is made by Evolved Software and has the following features:
Very easy to create top quality 3D trees models.
Create any tree, not limited to just one tree type.
Edit each joint as well as break joints.
Render to image for leaf creation.
Adjustable LOD.
Exports to *.dbo *.fbx *.obj *.x .
Free.
While TreeIt ships with several textures making it easy to get started creating trees, you can also download several preconfigured trees from the tree library. Check out TreeIt in action in the video below, including a quick step by step tutorial on importing your model into the Godot game engine.
bforartists 2.0 was just released. bforartists is a fork of Blender aimed at making Blender more usable for artists, new users and indie developers with a series of changes including new keymaps, icons, workflow and completely new documentation.
Key changes over traditional Blender include:
custom key mapping
mouse only navigation (great for touch screens like the Surface)
widget manipulation with cursor off widget
keymaps can switch between BForArtists and Blender
theme has coloured icons and increased contrast
icons in menus, 2x more icons
removal of duplicate menus, if its in toolshelf, it’s not in the menu
menus for all hotkey only items (such as Text->Move Cursor)
reduced number of workspace templates
left aligned text in menus such as toolbox
lock camera to view icon
primitive toolbar in 3D viewport, customizable and dynamic to mode
bforartist targeted at beginners and indie developers, not pros
PDF manuals (WIP) with more detail, in PDFs
Learn more about the 2.0 release here. You can check out bforartists in action in the video below. The documentation is currently a WIP and is available here.
There is a new Humble Bundle of interest to game developers, the Humble Applied Math Productivity by Mercury Learning bundle is a collection of mathematics related e-books. As with all Humble Bundles, this one is organized into tiers, including:
1$ Tier
· Dimensional Analysis for Unit Conversion Using MATLAB
· Numeric Methods in Engineering and Science
· Algebra Essentials
· Mathematical Physics: An Introduction
· Foundations of Physics
· Research Methods for Information Systems
· Linear Algebra
8$ Tier
· Essentials of Modern Algebra
· RFModule
· The Special Theory of Relativity
· Foundations of Mathematics: Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry and Calculus
· Mathematical Methods for Physics
· Excel Functions and Formulas
· Applied Linear Algebra and Optimization using MATLAB
· Finite Element Analysis A Primer
· Optimization using Linear Programming
15$ Tier
· Multivariable Vector Calculus
· Structural Steel Design
· Mathematics for Computer Graphics and Game Programming
· Geometry Creation and Import
· Flight Science
· Direct Energy Conversion Technologies
· Cluster Analysis and Data Mining
· Commutative Algebra
· Comsol: Heat Transfer Models
As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your money is allocated, between Humble, charity, the publisher and if you so choose (and thanks so much if you do!) to support GFS if purchased using this link. You can learn more about this bundle in the video below.
Today we are checking out Ct.js, a cross platform open source 2D game engine/editor. Available for Windows, Mac and Linux, Ct.js is a surprisingly full featured and easy to use game engine with a modular full level editor, easy programming and excellent documentation. It’s source code is available on GitHub under the MIT open source library, along with complete building instructions.
Today we are taking a look at Spaceship Generator, an open source procedural space ship creator add-on for Blender. Spaceship generator can automatically create a variety of space craft, like the ones below.
The above link is for Blender 2.7x only. Fortunately a user has created a Blender 2.8x compatible port that is available here on GitHub.
In the video below we demonstrate Spaceship Builder in action as well as showing how it can be installed and used.
Microsoft MakeCode is a game engine aimed directly at getting people started with game development with an easy to use game engine. MakeCode can be run directly in the browser using MakeCode Arcade requiring no login or signup to get started. Programming is done using a Scratch like visual programming language, but at any point in time you can switch over to JavaScript that is being generated. There is also the ability to extend the capabilities of MakeCode with extensions, that can also be written as JavaScript.
In addition there are several simple consoles and projects that can be used to run your generated games, which can also be simply saved and shared in the form of a custom encoded PNG image file. If you are looking to start game development, or are interested in getting a child involved in game development, MakeCode is a great option.
Additionally MakeCode Arcade is an open source project available on GitHub under the MIT license, if you wish to contribute or simply run the server locally.
We go hands on and show creation of a simple game in the video below.
Inskscape, the open source cross platform vector graphics application, just released the first release candidate on the way to a full 1.0 release. Along side the RC1 release, they also released version 0.92.5 of the stable branch.
Details of the two releases from the Inkscape news pages:
Inkscape 0.92.5
While we are working to release Inkscape 1.0 in the very near future, we have addressed some bugs in the stable 0.92 series. Most notably, an issue for Windows 10 users that prevented Inkscape from discovering fonts that have not been installed system-wide has now been fixed. Inkscape extensions written in Python will now also run with Python 3, while compatibility with the (deprecated) Python 2 is maintained.
For macOS, the 1.0 will feature the easiest installation and best macOS integration that Inkscape has ever offered. There are, however, unique issues that will require additional testing and improvement for our Apple fans.
If you run into any bugs, especially with the Release Candidate, please help us by reporting them promptly, so we can try to fix them before we release the final 1.0 version.
You can learn more about Inkscape RC 1.0 in the video below. The car SVG graphic used in the demo is available here if you want to compare performance results.
In the aftermath of Microsoft purchasing GitHub there have been several changes for the better with the popular code repository. The first major update was creation of a free tier with unlimited private repositories, with the limit of 3 users per private repo. Today, that limitation has been removed, officially making all major GitHub features available for free to all users. At the same time, GitHub also announced price changes for existing customers.
We’re happy to announce we’re making private repositories with unlimited collaborators available to all GitHub accounts. All of the core GitHub features are now free for everyone.
Until now, if your organization wanted to use GitHub for private development, you had to subscribe to one of our paid plans. But every developer on earth should have access to GitHub. Price shouldn’t be a barrier.
This means teams can now manage their work together in one place: CI/CD, project management, code review, packages, and more. We want everyone to be able to ship great software on the platform developers love.
Teams who need advanced features (like code owners), enterprise features (like SAML), or personalized support can upgrade to one of our paid plans.
We’re also reducing the price of our paid Team plan from $9 per user/month to $4 per user/month, effective immediately. Existing customers will have their bills automatically reduced going forward.
Learn more in the FAQ, or compare plans on our pricing page.
The pricing now breaks down as follows:
You can learn more about the changes in the video below.
