The annual Unity Spring Sale is on now. The Spring sale features over 500 of the best selling assets from the Unity Asset Store for 50% off, starting today April 15th and running until April 29th. Additionally each day of the sale there is one asset that is 70% off for a single day only.
Keep in mind, for these items the sale only lasts for a single day, then the price will revert to normal. All of the above links contain a code that pays GFS a small commission, so thank you if you use them. You can learn more about the Unity Spring Sale in the video below.
Pixelbox is a brand new all-in-one 2D game engine perfect for game jams or other small projects. Combining an easy to use JavaScript API with a complete set of editing tools including a map editor, sprite tools, palette tools, sound FX and music tools in a single >60MB download. Pixelbox is open source under the MIT license.
Documentation for Pixelbox coding is available on the GitHub page. There is also a beginners tutorial available over on Itch.io. Pixelbox also includes a stand alone music tracker application called Pata Tracker, documentation for which is available here.
Pixelbox is available for download on Windows and MacOS right here. Since it is an electron application, it should be possible to build a Linux install, but no binaries are currently provided. You can learn more about Pixelbox in the video below.
As with all Humble Bundles it is split into tiers:
1$ Tier
· Human Computation
· Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce
· Essentials of Game Theory: A Concise Multidisciplinary Introduction
8$ Tier
· Introduction to Intelligent Systems in Traffic and Transportation
· Metric Learning
· Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence: Logic, Probability, and Computation
· Data Management in Machine Learning Systems
· Natural Language Processing for Social Media, Second Edition
· Covariances in Computer Vision and Machine Learning
15$ Tier
· Introduction to Semi-Supervised Learning
· Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning
· Active Learning
· Adversarial Machine Learning
· Lifelong Machine Learning, Second Edition
· Detecting Fake News on Social Media
· Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
· Neural Network Methods for Natural Language Processing
· Creating Autonomous Vehicle Systems
· A Guide to Convolutional Neural Networks for Computer Vision
With Humble Bundles you can decide how your money is allocated, between Humble, charity, the publisher and (thanks so much if you do!) to support GFS if you purchase using this link. Learn more about the bundle in the video below.
Following hot on the heels of our LMMS overview we continue our journey into the world of Digital Audio Workstations with the highly recommended Reaper.
Key Reaper features:
Efficient, fast to load, and tightly coded. Can be installed and run from a portable or network drive.
Powerful audio and MIDI routing with multichannel support throughout.
64-bit internal audio processing. Import, record to, and render to many media formats, at almost any bit depth and sample rate.
Thorough MIDI hardware and software support.
Support for thousands of third-party plug-in effects and virtual instruments, including VST, VST3, AU, DX, and JS.
Hundreds of studio-quality effects for processing audio and MIDI, and built-in tools for creating new effects.
Automation, modulation, grouping, VCA, surround, macros, OSC, scripting, control surfaces, custom skins and layouts.
Reaper is not free software, but has a general 2 month non-expiring fully functional trial for Windows, Linux and OS/X. Unlike LMMS, Reaper doesn’t come out of the box loaded with instruments (which explains the 20mb download size!). In the video below, the VSTs demonstrated are from the Humble Music Producer Bundle expiring April 15th.
As mentioned earlier this week Unigine are launching a community version of their Unigine game engine, traditionally used in engineering and simulation industries. The new Community version has much more indie friendly licensing terms, including free usage up to $100K USD annual income.
In addition to the new Community version, Unigine 2.11 was just released with the following new features:
Community Edition, free for non-commercial/academic projects and enthusiasts.
Usability improvements and performance optimizations of UnigineEditor.
Fox Hole archviz demo with both desktop and VR modes.
You can learn more about the 2.11 features on the Unigine forums available here or by watching the Unigine launch trailer available here. You can sign up for Unigine Community right here.
As always we do a deeper dive on Unigine 2.11 and Unigine Community in the video below.
Humble are running another bundle of interest to game developers, this one is the 7000 Game Dev Icon Bundle a collection of thousands of icons from inventory items, to weapons to match-3 style game icons. Be sure to check your purchase history on Humble though, many of the icons in this bundle were in previous bundles.
As with all bundles, this one is organized into tiers:
1$ Tier
Fantasy Weapon Icons
Blue Loot Box
Jewelry Icons
Armor Icon Pack
Flat Skills Icon
15$ Tier
Spellbook Page 01
Spellbook Page 02
Spellbook Page 03
Spellbook Page 04
Sci-Fi Icons Pack
Sci-Fi Skill Icons Pack
Pirates Icons Pack
Witch Craft Icons
Fruit and Vegetables Icons
Gems Icon
Trading Icons
RPG Armor Sets
RPG Weapons Icons
Loot Icons
Herbal Icons
Prehistoric Age Icons
20$ Tier
Bags and Boxes Icons
Scrolls and Books Icons
Magic Items
Potions Icons
Resources and Craft Icon Pack
Weapon and Armor Icon Pack
Fishing Icons
Hunting Icons
Forest Icons
Necromancer Icons
Sci-Fi Armor Icons
Mining Icons
Trophy Icons
Barbarian Icons
Engineering Craft Icons
Food Icons
Spellbook Page 05
Spellbook Page 06
Spellbook Page 07
Spellbook Page 08
Spellbook Page 09
Skill Icon Pack
Sci-Fi Flat Skills
Strategy Game Icons
As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your money is allocated, between charity, humble the publisher and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS if purchased using this link. You can learn more and see inside one of the icon packs in the video below.
Unigine is a commercial 3D game engine used heavily in the simulation and engineering industry. Last year Unigine started offering a game oriented license, however compared to Unity and Unreal, it was still quite pricey, especially for smaller or indie developers who make less than $100,000 a year. Thankfully Unigine are offering a new Community license (available sometime this week) specifically targeting these developers.
Details of the new Unigine Community version:
Version
Community
Eligibility
● Non-commercial projects
● Revenue or funding less than $100K in the last 12 months
Not available for
● Defense-related projects
● Enterprises from Energy, Mining, Oil & Gas industries
● Gambling
● See other editions
Price
Free, no royalty
The community version will be available later this week. In the meanwhile you can check out Unigine Community in action in the video below. You can also check out our prior hands-on video here.
In the face of the Covid-19 outbreak, several tech companies have stepped up in their attempt to make life a little bit easier, including Pluralsight. Pluralsight are running a promo called Stay Home Skill Up #FreeApril, which makes all 7000+ of their courses available for free. You do not need a credit card to sign up, simply an email address. The free account is valid during the month of April, expiring May 1st.
Click here to sign up. You can learn more about the promotion and Pluralsight in general in the video below.
Shiro Games, the developers behind such games as Evoland, Northgard and Darksburg, just posted a blog post on the technology they use to develop their game.
The primary parts of the development stack include:
Haxe is a cross platform open source programming language with a high-level strictly typed language capable of being compatible to multiple languages or runtimes.
A game focused game engine with a built in tilemap editor. You can learn more about the CastleDB here.
Combined together you get a complete, battletested and production ready game engine with several high quality shipped titles under it’s belt. You can learn more about the entire technology stack in the video below.
Today we are taking a look at PixaFlux, an interesting free Windows based image creation and manipulation tool capable of creating PBR textures. The entire process is node based and PixaFlux ships with an absolute ton of nodes to work with. PixaFlux isn’t really easily described and is better seen or experienced, as you can in the video below.
PixaFlux is free to download for Windows, the download link is available here.
There is plenty of documentation to get you started. There is a complete Wiki with step by step text tutorials available here. There are additionally dozens of video tutorials available here.
The best way to get started with PixaFlux though is to see it in action in this video.
