Category: Game Development

Finishing in hard cover form just in time for GTC 2019, NVidia and APress have team up to author Ray Tracing Gems, a book on real-time raytraced graphics development in the popular “Gems” format.  Even better, they are making digital chapters available as they are developed, free to those with a NVidia developer account (which is also free).  The chapters are distributed under the Creative Commons 4.0 International License and are available for download here.  Unfortunately Part 5 is currently missing and parts 6 and 7 are slated to be published later this week.

Here is the current table of contents from the RealTimeRendering homepage:

PART 1: RAY TRACING BASICS, editor: Chris Wyman

• 1. Ray Tracing Terminology, by Eric Haines and Peter Shirley
• 2. What is a Ray? by Peter Shirley, Ingo Wald, Tomas Akenine-Möller, and Eric Haines
• 3. Introduction to DirectX Raytracing, by Chris Wyman and Adam Marrs
• 4. A Planetarium Dome Master Camera, by John E. Stone
• 5. Computing Minima and Maxima of Subarrays, by Ingo Wald

PART 2: INTERSECTIONS AND EFFICIENCY, editor: Ingo Wald

• 6. A Fast and Robust Method for Avoiding Self-Intersection, by Carsten Wächter and Nikolaus Binder
• 7. Precision Improvements for Ray/Sphere Intersection, by Eric Haines, Johannes Günther, and Tomas Akenine-Möller
• 8. Cool Patches: A Geometric Approach to Ray/Bilinear Patch Intersections, by Alexander Reshetov
• 9. Multi-Hit Ray Tracing in DXR, by Christiaan Gribble
• 10. A Simple Load-Balancing Scheme with High Scaling Efficiency, by Dietger van Antwerpen, Daniel Seibert, and Alexander Keller

PART 3: REFLECTIONS, REFRACTIONS, AND SHADOWS, editor: Peter Shirley

• 11. Automatic Handling of Materials in Nested Volumes, by Carsten Wächter and Matthias Raab
• 12. A Microfacet-Based Shadowing Function to Solve the Bump Terminator Problem, by Alejandro Conty Estevez, Pascal Lecocq, and Clifford Stein
• 13. Ray Traced Shadows: Maintaining Real-Time Frame Rates, by Jakub Boksansky, Michael Wimmer, and Jiri Bittner
• 14. Ray-Guided Volumetric Water Caustics in Single Scattering Media with DXR, by Holger Gruen

PART 4: SAMPLING, editor: Alexander Keller

• 15. On the Importance of Sampling, by Matt Pharr
• 16. Sample Transformations Zoo, by Peter Shirley, Samuli Laine, David Hart, Matt Pharr, Petrik Clarberg, Eric Haines, Matthias Raab, and David Cline
• 17. Ignoring the Inconvenient When Tracing Rays, by Matt Pharr
• 18. Importance Sampling of Many Lights on the GPU, by Pierre Moreau and Petrik Clarberg

PART 5: DENOISING AND FILTERING, editor: Jacob Munkberg

• 19. Cinematic Rendering in UE4 with Real-Time Ray Tracing and Denoising, by Edward Liu, Ignacio Llamas, Juan Cañada, and Patrick Kelly
• 20. Texture Level of Detail Strategies for Real-Time Ray Tracing, by Tomas Akenine-Möller, Jim Nilsson, Magnus Andersson, Colin Barré-Brisebois, Robert Toth, and Tero Karras
• 21. Simple Environment Map Filtering Using Ray Cones and Ray Differentials, by Tomas Akenine-Möller and Jim Nilsson
• 22. Improving Temporal Antialiasing with Adaptive Ray Tracing, by Adam Marrs, Josef Spjut, Holger Gruen, Rahul Sathe, and Morgan McGuire

PART 6: HYBRID APPROACHES AND SYSTEMS, editor: Morgan McGuire

• 23. Interactive Light Map and Irradiance Volume Preview in Frostbite, by Diede Apers, Petter Edblom, Charles de Rousiers, and Sébastien Hillaire
• 24. Real-Time Global Illumination with Photon Mapping, by Niklas Smal and Maksim Aizenshtein
• 25. Hybrid Rendering for Real-Time Ray Tracing, by Colin Barré-Brisebois, Henrik Halén, Graham Wihlidal, Andrew Lauritzen, Jasper Bekkers, Tomasz Stachowiak, and Johan Andersson
• 26. Deferred Hybrid Path Tracing, by Thomas Schander, Clemens Musterle, and Stephan Bergmann
• 27. Interactive Ray Tracing Techniques for High-Fidelity Scientific Visualization, by John E. Stone

PART 7: GLOBAL ILLUMINATION, editor: Matt Pharr

• 28. Ray Tracing Inhomogeneous Volumes, by Matthias Raab
• 29. Efficient Particle Volume Splatting in a Ray Tracer, by Aaron Knoll, R. Keith Morley, Ingo Wald, Nick Leaf, and Peter Messmer
• 30. Caustics Using Screen Space Photon Mapping, by Hyuk Kim
• 31. Variance Reduction via Footprint Estimation in the Presence of Path Reuse, by Johannes Jendersie
• 32. Accurate Real-Time Specular Reflections with Radiance Caching, by Antti Hirvonen, Atte Seppälä, Maksim Aizenshtein, and Niklas Smal

Once compiled the electronic version of the book will remain freely downloadable, although in what formats has yet to be determined.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjhTm0MIqCs&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News Book

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A new game development related Humble Bundle, the Humble Fantasy GameDev Bundle has just gone live.  This bundle consists of thousands of art assets mostly with a fantasy RPG theme.  As always with Humble Bundles, a portion of your proceeds go to the creator, a portion go to the Humble team, a portion goes to charity and a portion can go to support this channel.

Humble Bundles are always split into pricing tiers, although in this case the content is heavily loaded toward the top price tier of $20 USD.  If you buy the top tier, you get all of the assets below it.  The Fantasy GameDev bundle consists of:

1$ Tier

• Potion Icons
• Game Chest
• SpellBook Page 01
• Wooden UI
• Fantasy Badges
• RPG Weapons Icons

17.31$ Tier

• TCG Card Design
• Armor Icon Pack
• Sci-Fi Skill Icon Pack
• Engineering Craft Icons
• Loot Icons
• Fishing Icons
• Flat Skills Icons
• Survival Armor Icons
• Resources Flat Icons
• Mobs Avatar Icons
• Character Avatar Icons
• Magic Badges

20$ Tier

• Fantasy Icon Megapack
• SpellBook Megapack
• TCG Cards Pack
• Action RPG Loot
• Action RPG Armor
• Fantasy Animate Avatars
• RPG Class Badges
• Western Icons
• GUI Megapack
• Monster Avatar Icons
• Fantasy Characters
• Fairytale Icons Megapack

The bundle is available here while you can see the contents of the Bundle in the video below.  Unfortunately the license is not clearly stated, however the Humble team made the following tweet:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu3djvXgowM&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News

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With the recent release of Godot 3.1 beta, it’s a good time to look at the future.  That is exactly what Juan Linietsky, lead developer on the Godot engine has done.  On Twitter he laid out his current roadmap for development priorities in Godot 4.0/4.1.

In a pair of tweets, he first discussed general Godot improvements, mostly around the renderer:

Then in a second tweet, he discussed Physics improvements:

Keep in mind, although Juan is the lead and perhaps most important developer on the Godot team, he is by no means the only one.  This means even though you don’t see a feature on the two above lists doesn’t mean it wont happen, as there is a vibrant community of developers adding new features to Godot.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f8xU-gEkg4&w=1280&h=720]

GameDev News Godot

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Earlier today Improbable released the following statement regarding their cloud based networking service SpatialOS:

Today we must regretfully inform our community of the following developments.

• Unity’s block of SpatialOS: The game engine provider Unity recently changed (Dec 5) and then clarified directly to us (9 Jan) their terms of service to specifically disallow services like Improbable’s to function with their engine. This was previously freely possible in their terms, as with other major engines.
• What this means: Unity has clarified to us that this change effectively makes it a breach of terms to operate or create SpatialOS games using Unity, including in development and production games.
• Ongoing negotiation: Worryingly, this change occurred during an open commercial negotiation with the company to find a way to do more together.
• Revoked Unity license: In addition, Unity has revoked our ability to continue working with the engine for breaching the newly changed terms of service in an unspecified way.  This will affect our ability to support games.
• Continuing service for all other engines: Users of all other engines remain completely unaffected and we are working with other engine providers to see if they can help support engine transitions for customers hit by this change.

The updated Terms of Service section 2.4 from Unity now reads:

2.4 Streaming and Cloud Gaming Restrictions.

You may not directly or indirectly distribute the Unity Software, including the runtime portion of the Unity Software (the “Unity Runtime”), or your Project Content (if it incorporates the Unity Runtime) by means of streaming or broadcasting so that any portion of the Unity Software is primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet or other network to end user devices without a separate license or authorization from Unity. Without limiting the foregoing, you may not use a managed service running on cloud infrastructure (a “Managed Service”) or a specific integration of a binary add-on (for example, a plugin or SDK) or source code to be integrated in the Unity Software or Your Project Content incorporating the Unity Runtime (an “SDK Integration”) to install or execute the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server, unless such use of the Managed Service or SDK Integration has been specifically authorized by Unity.  Additionally, you may not integrate the Unity Runtime with a Managed Service or  SDK Integration and offer that integration to third parties for the purpose of installing or using the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server. For a list of Unity authorized streaming platforms, Managed Services and SDK Integrations, click here.This restriction does not prevent end users from remotely accessing your Project Content from an end user device that is running on another end user device.  You may not use a third party to directly or indirectly distribute or make available, stream, broadcast (through simulation or otherwise) any portion of the Unity Software unless that third party is authorized by Unity to provide such services.

In a nutshell, the new ToS seem to prevent running any portion of the Unity runtime on a cloud based install without prior licensing of the cloud hosting company and Unity directly.  The timing of this is quite interesting following on the heels of a partnership between Unity and Google to provide cloud based networking services.

In the meantime, developers that built their game around Unity and SpatialOS are going through a bit of a rollercoaster ride of emotions right now, such as Spilt Milk Studio:

Followed by:

Unity have not yet released a public content although their forums are quite… lively.

UPDATE: Tim Sweeney, founder and owner of Epic Games was quick to comment upon Unity’s gaff here and to reassure Unreal Engine developers that this wont happen to them:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h6Vg3iCA3k&w=1280&h=720]

GameDev News Unity

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Back in June of 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub for an eye watering 7.5 Billion dollars.  This transaction took several months to make it through regulatory approval, with Microsoft finally taking control near the end of 2018.  Yesterday, we saw the first official impact of the ownership change and for end users, it’s a pretty good change.  The free tier of GitHub now offers unlimited private code repos!  This was arguably the biggest reason for many small developers to actually pay for a premium account, so for these developers, they can downgrade to free and save their money.  Now the major limitation between Free and Pro accounts is the number of collaborators in a private repo, with the free tier have a limit of 3, while the pro tier has no such limit.

Details of the new changes from the Github blog:

• GitHub Free now includes unlimited private repositories. For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free. Many developers want to use private repos to apply for a job, work on a side project, or try something out in private before releasing it publicly. Starting today, those scenarios, and many more, are possible on GitHub at no cost. Public repositories are still free (of course—no changes there) and include unlimited collaborators.

• GitHub Enterprise is the new unified product for Enterprise Cloud (formerly GitHub Business Cloud) and Enterprise Server (formerly GitHub Enterprise). Organizations that want the flexibility to use GitHub in a cloud or self-hosted configuration can now access both at one per-seat price. And with GitHub Connect, these products can be securely linked, providing a hybrid option so developers can work seamlessly across both environments.

Pricing for individuals now breaks down as follows:

Not a bad first move…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7n1QC0w2Zk&w=1280&h=720]

GameDev News Tools

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Xenko 3.1 beta has just been released.   This is the first major point release since the Xenko project went open source this summer.  The primary focus of this beta is reorganizing Xenko to make it play nicely with the NuGet distribution system, although this refactoring has some very cool side effects.  Now you are able to use individual components of Xenko on their own.  For example, if you wanted to use the Xenko graphics library on it’s own, you can, independent of the rest of the Xenko game engine.  This release also moves towards Xenko using .NET standard.

Details of the release from the Xenko blog:

Xenko was always a big proponent of NuGet: since first version, Xenko was distributed as a NuGet package.

However, due to limitations (hello packages.config and project.json!), we were leveraging NuGet more as a distribution medium than proper NuGet packages: Xenko 3.0 is still a monolithic single package and it would not work out of the box when referenced from Visual Studio without using Xenko Launcher and Game Studio.

Xenko 3.0 paved the way by making Xenko compatible with the new project system (game projects were referencing Xenko using a PackageReference).

Today, Xenko 3.1 brings Xenko as a set of smaller NuGet package, each containing one assembly, with proper dependencies:

As a result, it is now possible to create a game project that references only the packages you want. Here are a few examples of “core” packages:

• Xenko.Engine: allows you to use core engine runtime (including its dependencies)
• Xenko.Core.Assets.CompilerApp: compile assets at build time
• Xenko.Core.Mathematics or Xenko.Graphics: yes, if you want to make a custom project only using Xenko mathematics or graphics API without the full Xenko engine, you can!
• Xenko.Core.Assets, Xenko.Presentation or Xenko.Quantum: all those piece of tech being used to build Xenko tooling are also available for reuse in other projects. Nothing prevents you from generating assets on the fly too!

Then, various parts of the engine are distributed as optional packages:

• Xenko.Physics
• Xenko.Particles
• Xenko.UI
• Xenko.SpriteStudio
• Xenko.Video

If you don’t reference those packages, they won’t be packaged with your game either. In many situations, it results in a smaller packaged game and improved startup time.

In addition to the above changes, you can take a look at the commit log on GitHub for other aspects that made it into the 3.1 release.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dWELSNkzUE&w=1280&h=720]

GameDev News C# Paradox Engine

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As has become a tradition here on GameFromScratch, every year we track down and present the best Black Friday deals of interest for game developers.  This year is no exception, so here they are!  Although it is becoming less and less of a thing, this page will also track applicable Cyber Monday deals as well.  If you know of a missing deal, let me know in the comments down below and I will do my best to add it.

3D Coat (Store Link)

3D Coat is a 3D sculpting, paintings and PBR texturing application that is currently $100 off during Black Friday, valid through Nov 26th.

Adobe (Store Link)

Adobe are offering 25% off their entire creative suite annual subscription service.  This includes seminal products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Animate and more.

APress (Store Link)

Any aPress published ebook for $7.

Affinity Paint/Designer (Store Link)

All Serif products are currently 30% off for Black Friday, including Affinity Designer, Painter and Painter for iOS.  If you want to learn more about Affinity Designer, check out our recent video.

Allegorithmic (Substance) (Store Link)

Save 33% on annual subscriptions for their Substance Suite of PBR texturing tools (Painter, Designer, B2M).  For more information on Substance Painter, check out our recent hands on video.

Amazon

Amazon is always heavily involved in Black Friday and sell a wealth of software and hardware that’s useful for game developers.  I will be updating this category as deals come online.

Asus GX501 15” Ultra Portable GeForce 1070 Laptop $400 Off

Corel Draw 30% Off

Corel Painter 2019 33% Off

CyberPowerPC PC Towers – @20% Off

Dell XPS 15 Laptop with 1050 Geforce $200 Off

Gigabyte Aero 15x 1070 Thin Laptop $550 Off

Google PixelBook 19% Off

MacBook Pro 13” $100 Off

MSI GS63VR Stealth $350 Off

Microsoft Surface Go 10% Off

Logitech MX Master 50% Off

Oculus Rift $50 Off

Razer Blade Stealth $200 Off

Samsung Monitors @25% Off

Samsung Tablets 33-44% Off

Smith Micro Software (Anime Studio, MoHo, Poser, etc) – Moho 30% off

CGTrader (Store Link)

CG Trader are offering up to 50% discount on 3D models this Black Friday.

ClipPaint Studio (Store Link)

ClipPaint Studio (the successor to Manga Studio) is an anime style painting application that is currently 50% off for Black Friday.

The Foundry (Store Link)

The Foundry are offering 30% discounts to Modo subscriptions and 15% off maintenance.

Humble Bundle RPG Game Dev Bundle (Store Link)

Technically not a Black Friday sale, but the Humble RPG Game Dev Bundle is going on during the same period.  Now with an improved license, you can get a ton of RPG related graphics, music and icons for a low price while helping charity.  I got hands-on with the bundle in this video.

Marmoset (Store Link)

Save up to 50% on all Marmoset Software, such as Toolbag, Viewer and Hexels.  See Hexels in action in this video.

Microsoft Store (Store Link)

The Microsoft store is an ecceletic mix of software, computers and devices, with a variety of items on sale during Black Friday such as laptops, tablets and VR headsets.

PluralSight (Store Link)

Pluralsight offer online training and courses.  Their Black Friday sale includes 33% off on subscriptions.

Packt Books (Store Link)

All eBooks and videos from Packt Publishing are available for $10 during the sale.

Quixel (Store Link)

Quixel’s sale doesn’t actually start until Black Friday.  Generally its a discount of their texturing software as well as their texture resources.

Safari Books Online (Store Link)

Safari Books is O’Reilly Press’ online book repository, offering full access to thousands of computer related books.  This sale, good through Monday, is good for 50% off an annual subscriptions, a $200 value.

Steam Autumn Sale (Store Link)

Steam is also having their annual autumn sale with tons of game development software available at discounted pricing.

TurboSquid (Store Link)

TurboSquid is offering select 3D models from their catalog for up to 40% off.

Udemy (Store Link)

Udemy is offering most of their thousands of online courses for $10 each.

Unity Asset Store (Store Link)

There are sales across the entire Unity Asset Store for Black Friday, generally 50% off or better.  Pretty much all kinds of assets are currently on sale, models, plugins, tools, you name it.  They have also organized several discounted bundles specifically for Black Friday.

Unity Essentials Bundle – 55% Off

Unity World Building Bundle – 55% Off

Unity Ultimate Characters Bundle – 55% Off

Unity Quick Prototyping Bundle – 55% Off

Unreal Engine Marketplace (Store Link)

Unreal Engine aren’t having a Black Friday sale… they are having a “Fall Sale”.  Same thing, different label.  Save up to 90% off on 3,100 items in their online asset store.  The “totally not a Black Friday” sale ends on November 27th.

YoYo Games (Store Link)

YoYoGames are offering 20% off all licenses for all GameMaker products.

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GameDev News Tips

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