Category: Game Development

AppOnboard, perhaps most famous for the technology powering the Google App Store “Try Now” functionality have just acquired BuildBox.  BuildBox is a nocode or codeless game engine that just released version 3.0 and announced a pricing change.  The acquisition will not change the management or structure of the BuildBox team.

Details from the BuildBox blog announcement:

I’m extremely excited to announce the next chapter for Buildbox, and explain how we’re going to vastly expand our product, ability, and community going forward, but before I do that I believe it’s most important to discuss what is not changing.

With this acquisition, every single employee is staying with Buildbox, including myself and Nik.  Buildbox will run independently — as it always has — while being able to grow much more quickly, and tap into the great resources that AppOnboard provides.  Nik and I will still be focused 100% on vision and additions to complete line of our products. We will not be making any changes in product, besides improvements and additions we already have planned.

What we will have access too, that we did not before, is resources to help us hire more developers, content creators and more for Buildbox.  You’ll see our development times vastly improve, and content creation for Buildbox speed up drastically.

AppOnboard is amazingly dedicated to not changing our vision, but helping us see it through to its largest potential.

AppOnboard have also released a statement available here.  BuildBox also released an email to all developers with the following details (thanks J.P for the heads-up!):

A lot of changes are underfoot and all of them positive! Every employee from Buildbox that you know and love are all still here and will definitely be here for a long time. We’re the same Buildbox team that you know and love; it’s just that we have much more resources now to hire more developers, content creators, etc!
So what’s next for us?

• a FREE version of Buildbox
• much better Android, ad network, and export support
• new nodes and smart assets
• a new smart asset store
• roadmapping expansions for the MasterCollection software
• lots and lots of Buildbox 3 Upgrades
• … and so much more!

At face value, this development seems like a pure win for existing BuildBox developers.

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

GameDev News Engine

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Epic Games, the makers of Unreal Engine and Fortnite, just acquired Houseparty a multi person video chat based social network.  Houseparty is available in application form for both the AppStore and Google Play.  The reason for the acquisition isn’t entirely clear, but couldn’t have been cheap as Houseparty was fairly well funded.

Some details were released on a Medium post by Houseparty:

Today is a big day for us at Houseparty because we’re joining the Epic Games family!

Houseparty is the synchronous social platform that lets you connect face-to-face with the people you care about most. By teaming up with Epic, creator of Fortnite and Unreal Engine, we’ll be able to help even more people connect with their friends, family, and peers.

“Joining Epic is a great step forward in achieving our mission of bringing empathy to online communication,” said Sima Sistani, Co-founder and CEO of Houseparty. “We have a common vision to make human interaction easier and more enjoyable, and always with respect for user privacy.”

“Houseparty brings people together, creating positive social interactions in real time,” said Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games. “By teaming up, we can build even more fun, shared experiences than what could be achieved alone.”

So, why would a gaming company like Unreal Engine by a social video chat platform?  My best guess is to support their upcoming cross platform online services initiative although that is entirely speculation at this point.  If you are an existing Houseparty user, according to the FAQ in the linked Medium article, your life should remain unchanged in the near future at least.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1JzymBRhFA&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News Unreal

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Construct beta r153 has just been released.  Construct is a “codeless” HTML5 based game engine that runs entirely in your browser.  The major feature of this new update is the new ease curve editor which can be used for tweening timelines.  Addition you can now use both local and global variables in scripts in events.

Details from the release notes:

New Features:

• Custom easing curves to use with timelines

New Additions:

• Use custom easing curves in with the tween behavior

Changes:

• Consistently lowercase filenames on export to avoid case-sensitivity issues
• Also warn on Remote Preview if images over 4096 pixels big are used (previously only warned on export)
• Animations Editor: Pasting a color into the color inputs of the color palette now changes the alpha to 255 if it was previously 0

Bugs Fixes:

• Animations Editor: Background of the animation preview dialog was different to the background of the main panel
• Animations Editor: Content pasted twice when using the rectangle select tool
• Animations Editor: Possible crash while using the rectangle select tool
• Animations Editor: Colors not updated properly after pasting into the HEX color input of the Color Palette
• Tween Behavior: Runtime crash when destroying the instance affected by a tween which had not yet finished playing
• Attempting to copy in the text editor incorrectly triggered a paste action
• Disabling a built-in function block could prevent the project running
• Fix crash closing Find Results or Bookmarks bars (regression in r151)
• Unintentionally could drag view up and down with touch on iOS (regression in r151)
• C3 runtime: keep Multiplayer hosts alive even when browser window minimised
• Event sheet view: preserve trailing newlines in comments
• Runtime: context menus accidentally blocked on form controls (regression in r152)

Scripting Updates:

• Asset APIs to load external scripts & WebAssembly modules
• New ‘Loading external script & WebAssembly’ example
• Access global variables in event sheets via runtime.globalVars
• Access local variables in event sheets via localVars in script actions/blocks
• runtime.setReturnValue() function to make it easier to return script values from event functions
• Script interfaces for layouts and layers
• Editor now validates JavaScript code in your project before preview or export, prompting you to fix syntax errors
• Debugger CPU profiler now separately measures time spent in scripts
• Added warnings for unused variables, use-before-initalise and assigning to constants

GameDev News HTML5 Engine

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Serif have just released version 1.7 of both of their flagship applications, Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer.  These tools provide excellent alternatives to Adobe products such as Photoshop and Illustrator with a much lower, pay once price tag.  The 1.7 update applies to all platforms, Windows, Mac and iOS.

Affinity Photo changes:

• Big performance increases across Mac, Windows and iPad
• Pen and dial support for Surface devices
• HDR / EDR monitor support
• At least 2x faster loading of RAW files
• More effective noise reduction, hot pixel removal and wide colour space development
• New Sub Brushes to combine multiple brushes in a single stroke
• Symmetry (up to 32-way) is now supported – including on-canvas controls and optional mirroring
• On the fly nozzle rotation now available with shortcut keys
• New “Procedural texture” and “Voronoi” filter effects
• Live filter effects have been rewritten to improve performance
• An all-new HSL adjustment layer has been added, supporting custom hue ranges, new UI and picker controls
• Layers studio revamp
• Alternate futures for document history
• HEIF images can now be loaded, including loading of any depth map
• Added support for 12bit and 16bit CMYK TIFF files
• New Assets Panel available to store and drag and drop regularly used assets

Affinity Designer changes:

• Big performance increases across Mac, Windows and iPad
• Pen and dial support for Surface devices
• HDR / EDR monitor support
• Create and edit directly in any isometric plane
• Arrowheads!
• New transform mode in Node tool
• Lasso selection of nodes
• New sculpt mode added to pencil
• Add unlimited strokes and fills to a single shape
• New point tranform tool
• Many grid improvements, including a new cube grid and column guides
• Many PSD import / export improvements
• Layers studio revamp
• Pixel persona now supports sub-brushes and symmetry (up to 32-way)
• Alternate futures for document history

Learn more in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BH4rtq6L50&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News Applications

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GitHub have released version 2.0 of GitHub Desktop.  GitHub Desktop is the open source Electron based application that makes GitHub easier to use without requiring developers to drop to the command line to create, use and modify code repositories.  The 2.0 release brings three major new features: stashing, rebasing and new collaborative tools.

Details of the release from the release notes:

• New – You can now choose to bring your changes with you to a new branch or stash them on the current branch when switching branches – #6107

• New – Rebase your current branch onto another branch using a guided flow – #5953

• New – Repositories grouped by owner, and recent repositories listed at top – #6923 #7132

• New – Suggested next steps now includes suggestion to create a pull request after publishing a branch – #7505

• Added – .resx syntax highlighting – #7235. Thanks @say25!

• Added – “Exit” menu item now has accelerator and access key – #6507. Thanks @AndreiMaga!

• Added – Help menu entry to view documentation about keyboard shortcuts – #7184

• Added – “Discard all changes” action under Branch menu – #7394. Thanks @ahuth!

You can learn more about the major new features of this release on the Github blog.  GitHub Desktop is an open source MIT licensed project available here.  See GitHub Desktop 2 in action in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7f8qJscmRE&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News Applications

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YoYoGames have just released the beta version of the 2.2.3 release.  In addition to the usual slate of bug fixes and improvements, the marquee feature of this release is TvOS support, which is part of the mobile plan and enables you to target and support iOS based set-top boxes.  They have released three documents in support of TvOS with GameMaker.

Further details from the GMS blog:

• Desktop targets can now disable the file sandbox from the Game Options for each platform (Windows, macOS and Ubuntu). This permits you to save and load files from anywhere on the target system (within the limits of the OS and any antivirus or other file-permission restrictions on the local machine).

• The function surface_depth_disable() has been expanded to include all target platforms. This switches off the depth buffer for surfaces, which will reduce the memory overhead. For 2D games, especially on mobile, this is very useful – although for 3D you’ll probably want to leave it enabled. For more information see the manual.

• You can now create Local Asset Packages from resources in your projects. This means that you no longer need to go through the Marketplace to create YYMP files, enabling you to create your own local asset packages of scripts, objects, etc…. You can access this new feature from the Tools menu in the IDE, and the full details can be found in the manual inside the 2.2.3 IDE.

• New constants have been added to GML for NaN and infinity, as well as new functions to check these values, is_NaN() and is_infinity().

• Drag and Drop™ users can now add comments to their action scripts. This option is available from the Right Mouse Button menu in the active workspace.

• The resource tree has new options for sprites and sounds to quickly add one or more resources to a texture page or an audio group – accessed through the Right Mouse Button menu.

• A new option in General Preferences > Compiling to disable subst drives. When disabled, GameMaker Studio 2 will not create any virtual drives when compiling most platforms.

• Strings now accept 4 byte wide Unicode characters, allowing you to decode and encode Unicode characters in the upper bounds of the standard (including, but not limited to, emoji). This may adversely affect some users who have been using the \u escape character (see the manual for more information).

• New error reporting mechanism for submitting crash details to YoYoGames.

You can learn more about future GameMaker Studio releases in the development roadmap available here.  Details on accessing the beta channel of releases is available here.

GameDev News 2D Engine

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The Xenko open source game engine ( previously covered here, here and in tutorial form when it was still called Paradox here ) just released a complete game demo called Starbreach.  The demo was demonstrated at GDC 2017 and was recently updated to the current version of Xenko and has been released with full source and assets.

Details of the Starbreach demo from the Xenko blog:

Hi everyone, Silicon Studio agreed to release the Starbreach demo from GDC 2017, along with all associated assets as open source (see license), for the Xenko community to use. Code in the project is released under an MIT license, the assets are released under a attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Starbreach was originally developed as the Xenko GDC demo for 2016 by Silicon Studio with art support from N-iX production studios. Virgile Bello (xen), Xenko’s lead developer has spent a chunk of time updating the demo and assets to work with the latest release of the Xenko.

You can find the demo and assets here: https://github.com/xenko3d/Starbreach

Check out the demo in action and learn how to get started in the video below.

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

GameDev News Paradox Engine

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Raylib is an open source C based cross platform game framework released under the zlib/libpng open source license that I previously referred to as “the easiest C/C++ game framework I’ve ever found” and that description is still true today.  Raylib started life as a way to teach non-programmers game development in an accessible manner and I would say for the most part, mission accomplished.  Since that initial release, raylib has continued to improve and the just released raylib 2.5 is one of the biggest releases yet.

Details from the release notes:

• New window management and filesystem functions to query monitor information, deal with clipboard, check directory files info and even launch a URL with default system web browser. Experimental High-DPI monitor support has also been added through a compile flag.

• Redesigned Gamepad mechanism, now generic for all platforms and gamepads, no more specific gamepad configurations.
  Redesigned UWP input system, now raylib supports UWP seamlessly, previous implementation required a custom input system implemented in user code.

• rlgl module has been redesigned to support a unique buffer for shapes drawing batching, including LINES, TRIANGLES, QUADS in the same indexed buffer, also added support for multi-buffering if required. Additionally, rlPushMatrix()/rlPopMatrix() functionality has been reviewed to behave exactly like OpenGL 1.1, models_rlgl_solar_system example has been added to illustrate this behaviour.

• VR simulator has been reviewed to allow custom configuration of Head-Mounted-Device parameters and distortion shader, core_vr_simulator has been properly adapted to showcase this new functionality, now the VR simulator is a generic configurable stereo rendering system that allows any VR device simulation with just a few lines of code or even dynamic tweaking of HMD parameters.

• Support for Unicode text drawing; now raylib processes UTF8 strings on drawing, supporting Unicode codepoints, allowing rendering mostly any existent language (as long as the font with the glyphs is provided). An amazing example showing this feature has also been added: text_unicode.

• Brand new text management API, with the addition of multiple functions to deal with string data, including functionality like replace, insert, join, split, append, to uppercase, to lower… Note that most of those functions are intended for text management on rendering, using pre-loaded internal buffers, avoiding new memory allocation that user should free manually.

• Multiple new shapes and textures drawing functions to support rings (DrawRing(), DrawRingLines()), circle sectors (DrawCircleSector(), DrawCircleSectorLines()), rounded rectangles (DrawRectangleRounded(), DrawRectangleRoundedLines()) and also n-patch textures (DrawTextureNPatch()), detailed examples have been added to illustrate all this new functionality.

• Experimental cubemap support, to automatically load multiple cubemap layouts (LoadTextureCubemap()). It required some internal rlgl redesign to allow cubemap textures.

• Skeletal animation support for 3d models, this addition implied a redesign of Model data structure to accomodate multiple mesh/multiple materials support and bones information. Multiple models functions have been reviewed and added on this process, also glTF models loading support has been added.

You can download raylib here, while the source code is available here.  In terms of learning the API, pretty much all you need to know is available on this cheatsheet.  Additionally there are a huge number of examples available (that can run in your browser) right here, each including full source code.

GameDev News CPP 2D

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