City Generator is a free and open-source procedural generation tool for creating American-style grid based cities. The source code is available on GitHub under the GPL 3 license, composed almost entirely of TypeScript code.
Features of City Generator include:
.png download
.png heightmap download
.svg download
.stl download
Several colour themes including Google Maps, Apple Maps, and hand-drawn styles
Pseudo-3D buildings
Open source
City Generator can export STL files that can then be imported into a 3D tool of choice for creating 3D levels. We should this process in Blender as well as the process of generating a city in City Generator in the video below.
Unity Connect was first launched back in 2016 as a sort of social hub for Unity developers. Due to declining interest Unity have announced Unity connect will be closing by February 4th, 2021. Users were sent the following email announcing the closure:
Hi User,
Today we’re announcing that on February 4, 2021, Unity Connect, our dedicated talent and sharing marketplace, will shut down. We’re proud of the community that rallied around Connect and we are inspired by the great sharing and discovery that came from it.
We want to make this transition as smooth as possible for everyone who uses Connect. If you are an active user on the platform, click here to learn more about the alternatives that will be provided for some Connect features. If you would like to download any part of your profile, please feel free to do so before we delete your information on February 4, 2021.
If you head on over to the Unity Connect website you will see a notice of the upcoming closure with the following details:
We launched Unity Connect almost four years ago in an effort to provide a free community tool for all users, of all experience levels, to connect with each other. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on February 4, 2021, we will retire Unity Connect. Some features, e.g. posting new content, creating job posts, will be locked prior to this date.
We understand that these changes might cause inconvenience, therefore, we have made sure to provide alternatives for some of the most popular Connect features, please read on to learn more.
You can learn more about the Unity Connect closure and the alternative services available for Unity Connect users in the video below.
Today Blender announced that Facebook would be joining the Blender Development Fund as a Corporate Sponsor. A corporate sponsor is the highest tier of sponsorship and means at least 120K euro per year in financial support, which generally gets translated as two full time developers on the project. Facebook will be joining the likes of Unity, Epic Games, AMD and NVIDIA in the corporate supporter tier.
Details from the Blender announcement:
To support these artists and the countless other animators, researchers, engineers, designers and content creators who depend on open source tools, Facebook wishes to contribute to the development of Blender. Which is why we’re proud to announce that Facebook will join the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a Corporate Patron as of Q4, 2020.
We at Blender see this as another important signal of the industry’s willingness to migrate to open source, and contribute to open source’s continual improvement.
Ton Roosendaal, Chairman Blender Foundation
Facebook currently use Blender in their AR product Spark AR Studio in addition to their ownership of Oculus. If you are worried about the corporate influence on Blender, don’t worry about it, for reasons described in this video. If you want to learn more about Facebooks support for Blender be sure to check out the video below.
Humble are running another bundle of interest to game developers, this one is the BIG Royalty-Free Music Bundle, a collection of “albums” containing game ready music in WAV and MP3 formats. The music is licensed in a way that enables you to distribute the music in your games, commercially or otherwise. As with all Humbles, this one is organized into tiers:
1$
Dark skies and other disasters
Haunted
The vanishing of Elisabeth Rose
Chronicles of the illusion world
Archives vol 1: the dark side
15$
Chuck kick ass
Shadows guild
The monster that lies within
Cult
Mindhunter
Forever and a day
Imagine
Archives vol 2: the love
25$
Chaos logic chaos the butterfly effect
The 29th planet
Black sails
Darkventures
Jotun
Pandemonium
Once upon a nightmare
Witchcraft
Slasher
The Lab
Dreamagination
Pixel: faster stronger harder
Superheroes
As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how the money is allocated, between Humble, Charity, the publisher and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS by purchasing with this link. You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.
Unity are running their annual Super Sale just in time for Black Friday, with 700+ assets 50% off as well as daily specials that are 70%+ off. Additionally if you purchase Unity pro or Unity Enterprise, you currently get an additional license, such as Unity Build, MARS, ArtEngine, Reflect or Pixyz, a heck of a deal if you were going to get a pro subscription anyways!
The daily deals are as follows:
The above items are only for sale on the date listed, so if you click a link on any other day you will see regular pricing. All of the above links contain an affiliate code that pays GFS a small commission if used (and thanks if you do!). You can learn more about the sale in the video below.
The Applied Math & Statistics Toolkit by Morgan & Claypool bundle is now live on Humble. While not directly books about game development math, they are more on math fundamentals and that is the underpinning of game development. As with all Humble Bundles it is organized into tiers:
1$ Tier
Essentials of Game Theory
Matrices in Engineering Problems
Statistics is Easy 2nd Edition
8$ Tier
Introduction to Logic 3rd Edition
An Introduction to Proofs with Set Theory
Discrete Distributions in Engineering and Applied Sciences
Analytical Performance Modeling for Computer Systems
Probability and Statistics for STEM
15$ Tier
An Introduction to Multivariable Mathematics
C Programming and Numerical Analysis
Essentials of Applied Math for Engineers and Scientists 2nd Edition
Fast Start Advanced Calculus
Fast Start Differential Calculus
Fast Start Integral Calculus
Introduction to Statistics Using R
An Introduction to Partial Differential Equations
An Introduction to Numerical Methods for Physical Sciences
As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your funds are allocated, between the publisher, charity, Humble and if you so choose (and thanks if you do) to support GFS using this link. You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.
BlockBench is a free 3d modelling, texturing and animation application for creating Minecraft style models. Blockbench is available on Windows, Mac and Linux, as well online.
Blockbench features include:
Blockbench is an all in one 3D Editor and Animator for Minecraft and other games and applications
Blockbench comes with a powerful animation editor. Animations can later be exported to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, rendered in Blender or Maya, or shared on Sketchfab.
Customize Blockbench with the built-in plugin store. Or create your own plugin and add a new feature or new format.
Collaborate with your friends on models, textures and animations – in real time, over the internet!
Blockbench is available in 12 languages, and the number is growing.
Create, edit and paint texture right inside the program. Create or import palettes, paint, draw shapes or automatically create templates.
You can learn more about Blockbench and see it in action in the video below.
We’re happy to share an exciting update: Epic Games is now a minority investor in SideFX. In Epic, SideFX gains a strong partner whose passion for the industry closely aligns with ours.
Kim Davidson remains the majority owner of SideFX, as well as President and CEO. He continues his strong, unwavering commitment to SideFX’s staff, customers, and partners.
SideFX and Epic are both committed to SideFX continuing its work with other industry partners – including all other content creation applications and game engines. This new development will have no impact at all on the Houdini development roadmap, as SideFX will continue to define its own path as an industry-leading procedural 3D platform for the film, TV, advertising and games sectors.
Dollar values of the investment were not disclosed. From the announcement it appears the investment should have minimal impact on neither Houdini or Unreal Engine. Epic Games have been making more and more investments of late including their $15M investment in Manticore Games.
Babylon.js, the open source 3D web based game engine, just released version 4.2 with a ton of new features and tools. Key features of the 4.2 release include:
New particle editor for direct creation of particle systems in the Inspector
New Node System in Babylon.js
new Sprite Editor built into the Inspector to create, control and save sprites
new Skeleton viewer to visual bones and bone weights in Inspector
texture inspector for debugging texture issues
PBR support in the Node material editor with access to metallic, roughness, clearcoat, sheen etc when creating materials
new Procedural Texture, Particle Shader, Post Processing modes added to the Node editor
reusable frames in Node Material editor, enabling you to reuse shader code between projects easily
playground templates, essentially quick access code snippets in the code editor using Ctrl+Space
direct support for pre-filtered .hdr files
support for React Native for creating native applications
KTX + Basis U texture compression support
much, much more
You can learn more about the release in this article here or by watching the video below. Babylon.js is an open source project under the Apache 2 license with the source code available on GitHub. If you are interested in learning more about Babylon, be sure to check out our older Babylon.js tutorial series.
This tutorial is going to be a little outside the normal topic of game development but should still be of interest to some of you because Luminar 4 is currently available on Humble Bundle. Luminar 4 is an AI powered image manipulation program that’s easy enough even I can use it! One of the challenges though is that it doesn’t formally support Affinity Photo out of the box, and Affinity Photo is my photo manipulation weapon of choice. Therefore in this tutorial we will show how to get Luminar 4 up and running on Affinity Photo 1.8.
If you are simply interested in learning more about Luminar 4 be sure to check out our hands-on video, it’s an impressive program.
Installing Luminar 4 with Affinity Photo
First, install Luminar 4. Just go with the defaults and don’t worry about the plugins portion if you don’t already have Photoshop installed.
After Luminar is installed, navigate to the install folder in Explorer. In my case it’s C:\Program Files\Skylum\Luminar 4. Once there, locate and copy the file Luminar4.8bf. Now we need to copy it into the Adobe plugins folder, a folder that you will most likely have to create. In explorer go to the folder C:\Program Files\Common Files and if one does not exist, create a folder called Adobe. Inside Adobe create a folder called Plug-ins, then inside that create a folder called CC, then paste the Luminar4.8bf file into that directory. The end result should be something like this:
Now right click Luminar 4 in the start menu and Run as Administrator. Now select File->Install Plugins from the main menu.
So long as you copied the file earlier into the right folder, you should now see Uninstall in the resulting Window.
Click Uninstall then Install and you are done with Luminar. Now fire up Affinity Photo and select Edit->Preferences. In the resulting window select Photoshop Plugins.
Now click the add button, then select the Luminar directory.
Once selected, Luminar 4 should show up in the detected plugins section. After installing the plugin it will prompt you to restart Affinity Photo. Once done, you can access Luminar 4 in Plugins->Skylum Software->Luminar 4
While these instructions are specific to Affinity Photo, any program such as Paintshop Pro should also be able to install Luminar using this process.
You can learn more about Luminar 4 and the Humble Bundle (plus see the above process in action) in the video below. The Humble links contain an affiliate code that enables you to direct a portion of the proceeds from your purchase to support GFS and thanks so much if you do!
