Category: Game Development

Back in April Unity launched Unity Learn, a completely free online learning portal for learning various aspects of using the Unity game engine.  Today they have announced Unity Premium, a paid expansion of Unity learn.  Unity Learn Premium costs 15$ a month, and is included in current Unity Pro subscriptions.  There is a 30 day free trial available.

Details of Unity Learn Premium from the Unity blog:

We believe that everyone should have access to high-quality, free learning resources for Unity, and we will continue to add to and maintain the free courses, projects, and tutorials on Unity Learn. More in-depth and advanced resources for serious hobbyists and professionals who want to specialize in an industry or get direct guidance will be available through Unity Learn Premium.

If you have a Unity Plus or Unity Pro license, you can access Unity Learn Premium for free with your current subscription. Just log in with your Unity ID and go to Unity Learn Premium to start learning!

Otherwise, you can try Unity Learn Premium for 30 days, free. After that, you can continue accessing all the great resources and interactive learning on Unity Learn Premium for $15 a month. 

In addition to content from Unity, Learn Premium also includes courses from partners such as Udemy and Pluralsight.  They are also offering bi-weekly online interactive sessions as well as Streaming Labs, quick start courses in a web hosted Unity Editor.

Check out the contents of Unity Premium in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvsFtTrdjfk&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News Unity Tutorial

There is a sale on Humble containing several applications of interest to game developers.  The sale started today, June 24th and runs for 7 days.  The following is a list of applications most interesting to game developers, as well as links to any prior coverage we have done on that topic if it’s available.

The links above contain affiliate tags, meaning any purchase helps GFS.  All software will give you a Steam key.  Keep in mind the Steam Summer Sale is coming soon, stay tuned as we will profile game development software featured in that sale once launched.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sybe8l8ujdQ&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News Applications Engine

After almost a year of silence, WaveEngine 3.0 preview has just been released.  WaveEngine is a cross platform C# powered ECS based 3D game engine that is completely free to use.  Sporting a new renderer and a sporting a completely new editor, WaveEngine 3.0 preview is still quite an early release.  We did a hands-on Closer Look review at a previous version of WaveEngine 3.0 for a good basis in how WaveEngine programming works.

Highlight details of the 3.0 preview release:

• New launcher and update system
• New WaveEditor
• Effects Viewer
• Materials Viewer
• Render Layer Viewer
• Sampler Viewer
• Textures Viewer
• Model Viewer
• Audio Viewer
• Scene Viewer
• New Effect Editor
• XR Ready
• Single Pass (Instanced) Stereo Rendering
• New extensible Render Pipeline
• New life cycle for entities
• New web project support
• New serialization system based on YAML
• New HoloLens 2.0 support

You can learn more and download the 3.0 preview release right here.  Keep in mind WaveEngine 3.0 is nowhere near ready for production use, with only a limited subset of platforms and features available.  Check out WaveEngine in action in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STc60yxhbR8&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News C# Engine

The HTML5 2D game framework Phaser just released version 3.18.0.  This release includes large rewrites to the Input API, as well as adding Multitouch support, Mouse Wheel support and more.

Details of the release from the Phaser blog:

After another month of hard work, we’re very happy to announce the release of Phaser 3.18. In this release we took the time to rewrite large chunks of the Input API. This allowed us to fix a number of issues that had arisen, as well as optimizing the internal event flow. Native support for complete Multi-Touch support, Mouse Wheels and more advanced Pointer Button handling are now available. The whole API is smaller and tidier after the clean-up, which is always a good thing.

We’ve also added lots of other features and updates, including better Matter physics constraint handling, Arcade Physics improvements, Audio decoding events, Text justification, new Bounds methods and a lot, lot more. As usual, it doesn’t end there, though. You’ll find hundreds of great new features, updates and fixes.

Phaser is available for download on GitHub.  Documentation has also been updated to the 3.18.0 standard and is available to read here.  There is more to the release than shown here, read the full release notes for complete details of this release.  If you are new to Phaser, be sure to check our introduction available here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t8Ns4_CIbs&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News HTML5 Phaser

Amazon have just released beta 1.19 of their game engine Lumberyard.  Sharing a common code base with CryEngine, CryTek and Amazon have taken their game engines in very different directions the last few years.  Lumberyard is free to use, so long as you host your own multiplayer services or use Amazon technologies.

The 1.19 release brings over 150 improvements, but there are two highlight features:

• New Dynamic Vegetation System. Procedurally generate a diverse and detailed biome in minutes instead of manually placing and painting in vegetation. Lumberyard’s new vegetation components support a wide range of artistic expressions and fine-grained control over the scale, density, and distribution in your biomes. You can also improve runtime performance by configuring segments of vegetation to be placed or removed at runtime based on player location and gameplay events.
• Major updates to Script Canvas. Create even more dynamic behaviors and gameplay without having to code or rely on expert engineers. We’ve made major improvements to Script Canvas, introducing support for containers such as arrays and maps, new Script Events that enable you to send events between graphs and scripts, and new graph validation and debugger features so you can find, diagnose, and fix invalid graphs more quickly. We’ve also made workflow improvements to make it even easier add, configure, and organize nodes in your graphs.

View the full release notes for complete details of this release.  Check out the video below to see the new vegetation system and script canvas improvements in action.  Lumberyard is available for download here, be aware however if you zoom the web page in, the download link goes away…  not the best UX there.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgd_S7PCFsE&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News Engine CryEngine

The Haxe programming language just released Haxe 4.0.0-rc3.  With this release the versatile Haxe programming language just got an additional compilation target, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Other details of the release:

On behalf of the Haxe Foundation, we are proud to announce the official release of the Haxe 4.0.0-rc.3! It is available along with the changelog at https://haxe.org/download.

The new Java Virtual Machine target is available! Generate JVM byte code directly from Haxe bypassing Java compilation step by adding -D jvm to your project targeting Java.

Unicode support was greatly improved across all targets.

Other than that, we fixed a lot of bugs and improved the quality of IDE services (compilation and completion server).

Also, we are considering different options about inline markup. The feature is subject to change in the future: https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe-evolution/issues/60

See the changelog below for further details. Please report any issues here: https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/issues

Thank you very much for your help!

Be sure the check the link for the full change log.  With the new ability to target JVM, this means you can now create Java based Android applications.  For more details on this process, check this Github project.  If you are looking for a Haxe game engine be sure to check out our list available here.  We have also done a Haxe + HaxeFlixel and Haxe + Heaps tutorial series.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=349b15213dM&w=853&h=480]

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GameDev News Haxe