Go is an open source programming language developed and supported by Google, by a who’s who of computer language designers. It is often used in large scale server projects at companies such as Google, Dropbox, Paypal, Twitch and Netflix. Today we are going to look at the game development frameworks and libraries available for making games using Go. We have previously created similar guides for languages such as C#, C++, Python, Lua, Codeless, Haxe and JavaScript.
2D Game Frameworks in Go:
Go Bindings:
3D Game Engines:
You can learn more about these frameworks and the Go programming language in the video below (or watch on Odysee).
In the age of COVID, with so many people working from home or in out of the ordinary scenarios, we may not necessarily have a ton of control over our environment. This means noise cancellation is perhaps more important than it has ever been. We are not immune to the effects and the audio quality of GFS videos have certainly suffered in the last few months. Enter RTX Voice.
If you are unaware, RTX Voice is a free plugin from NVIDIA that uses machine learning to filter out background noise. RTX Voice is described as:
NVIDIA RTX Voice is a new plugin that leverages NVIDIA RTX GPUs and their AI capabilities to remove distracting background noise from your broadcasts, voice chats, and remote video conferencing meetings. This allows users to “go live” or join a meeting without having to worry about unwanted sounds like loud keyboard typing or other ambient noise in noisy environments. RTX Voice also suppresses background noise from players in loud environments, making incoming audio easier to understand.
RTX Voice requires an RTX 2060 or higher and works with the vast majority of video capture applications including OBS Studio and Camtasia. The also offer RTX Voice support in their more comprehensive, but also free, Broadcast App.
We decided to put RTX Voice to the test in a simulated real world environment, using a Shure MV51 microphone and a Logitech Pro X headset (affiliate links). The tests were done with RTX Off and On with each device, as well as with background noise including typing and television. You can see (and hear!) the results in the video below (or watch on Odysee).
Yesterday PCUI, an open source UI framework for creating game tools and other web applications, was open sourced. PCUI is named as such because it is the UI layer powering the battle tested PlayCanvas game engine. It provides over a dozen controls, as well as implementing logic such as the Observer pattern for making binding your UI to your data. PCUI is open source under the liberal MIT license with the source code available on GitHub.
Details from the PlayCanvas blog:
Today, PlayCanvas is launching PCUI: a new, open source front-end framework for the web.
PCUI is designed with tools developers in mind. It is particularly well suited to building viewer and editor applications, providing a rich set of beautiful and consistent controls. It already powers the PlayCanvas Editor – the world’s most powerful WebGL production tool.
Here you can see tree controls, panels, buttons, checkboxes, toolbars, menus and more. The Editor also relies on PCUI’s observer system, that makes it easy to synchronize the state of your application’s UI with that of the underlying data. Plus, it has a built-in support for history to make implementing redo/undo a breeze.
In addition to the PlayCanvas game engine, PCUI is used to power the PlayCanvas GLTF viewer project as well, a project which is open source and shows you a real-world example of using PCUI in a TypeScript application. PCUI is also extremely well documented with several examples available. If you are interested in learning more about PlayCanvas be sure to check out two part tutorial. You can learn more about the PCUI release in the video below.
FlatRedBall is an open source C# based game engine with development dating back to 2005. It was originally built to run on-top of Managed Direct X, then was ported to XNA and when XNA was depreciated, it was again ported to run on top of the MonoGame framework.
FlatRedBall provides a layer of APIs and tooling on top of MonoGame designed to simplify the process of creating 2D games. You can currently create games for Windows (and UWP), Android and iOS, with Mac and Linux targets currently a work in progress. The heart of the tooling is Glue, which “glues” together the various other tools, including plugins for tasks such as UI development as well as support for the Tiled 2D map editor.
FlatRedBall is open source with the source code available on GitHub under the flexible and permissive MIT open source license. You can check out FlatRedBall in action in the video below (or here on Odysee). If you are interested in learning more or encounter a problem, they have an active Discord server available here.
Amazon have just released a new version of their CryEngine derived game engine, Lumberyard. Lumberyard is free to use, with the source code available, so long as your multiplayer services are either self hosted or use Amazon technologies. The 1.26 release brings several new features, including several around quality of life and usability.
Key features of Lumberyard 1.26 include:
UI 2.0 with updates across the entire user interface
WhiteBox modelling tool improvements
Updates to dynamic terrain and landscape canvas
PhysX physics simulation now production ready
Improvements to Setup Assistant and Project Configurator
RAD Tools support for physics simulation telemetry
Updated and streamlined Viewport Interaction Model (needs to be enabled)
Improved documentation
You can learn a great deal more about the Lumberyard 1.26 release in the release notes or by watching the video below. A great deal of focus was also given to the documentation including a new Welcome Guide to get you up and running.
It’s the first Tuesday of the month and that means it time for Unreal Christmas in October. Every month Epic Games gives away several assets for Unreal Engine developer and this month we got more than double the normal amount of new assets!
This months “Free for October” assets include:
The “Permanently Free” collection grew a fair bit as well:
Just be sure to “buy” the free assets before the first Tuesday in November and they are yours forever. You can learn more about this months giveaway in the video below.
The NeoAxis game engine just had a new release, NeoAxis 2020.6. NeoAxis is a Windows based 2D/3D game engine we previously showcased here and that was recently open sourced, sorta. The biggest new feature of NeoAxis 2020.6 is initial support for the Android platform. Other NeoAxis 2020.6 features include:
Android support via Xamarin.Android and OpenGL ES with Vulkan support in the future
New GUI controls including:
Tab Control
Context Menu
Tooltip
Toolbar
Images on UI Buttons
Easy Skybox importing
Automatic material tuning
You can learn more about the NeoAxis 2020.6 release here. Our previous hands-on video is available below.
Beef is a new open source cross platform programming languages that attempts to take C#-like syntax and giving it performance similar to C++ including manual memory management. Beef is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and includes a custom IDE. The 0.42.7 release adds the following new features:
Dynamic boxing from System.Variant
decltype(val).MemberName expressions
Scope moved outward for ‘out’ variable declaration
Improvements to unassigned variable detection
Added explicit “Test” project type
Reflected interface method dispatch
Interface filtering for distinct build options
IDE file recovery after crash/power loss
Better handling of merge conflict markers in source code
If you want to check out Beef, their is an installer/binaries available for Windows platforms here. On other platforms Beef can be built from source, the source code is hosted on GitHub under the MIT open source license. Earlier in the year we checked out an earlier version of the Beef language and IDE, as you can see in the video below.
ParticleShop is one of the applications that is featured in the current Be A Creative SuperHero Bundle currently running on Humble. This bundle is a collection of graphical applications and add-ons from Corel. Today we are taking a hands-on look at ParticleShop, a PhotoShop plugin (also compatible with PaintShop Pro 2020 and Affinity Photo) that brings the particle system based brushes from Corel Painter to these other applications.
ParticleShop is described as:
Create stunning image enhancements with ParticleShop, a powerful Adobe® Photoshop® brush plugin powered by Painter. Experience NEW expressive Dynamic Speckle brushes and living grab-and-go Particle brushes and that are easy to use with a pressure sensitive tablet, touchscreen or mouse. Use your creativity and imagination to artistically enhance photos, designs and illustrations with strokes of genius.
We’ve done all of the work for you! Immediately start creating with one of 11 built-in custom brushes. Whether you’re looking to add playful Dynamic Speckle flourishes or compelling Particle flare to your work, you’ll find just the brush you need to artistically enhance your imagery and exponentially increase your range of painting expertise. Plus, explore the additional brush packs that were designed to match your specific workflow needs.
Out of the box ParticleShop ships with a pack with 11 brushes, although the Bundle contains more than a half a dozen additional brush packs. You can see ParticleShop in action, including instructions on how to install in PaintShop Pro and Affinity Photo, as well as showcasing several of the brush packs, in the video below.
The Blender user interface has come a LONG way in recent years, especially with the release of Blender 2.8. That said, if you are using Blender on a laptop, especially if you don’t have a numberpad or are stuck using a trackpad, some parts of the experience are less than optimal. Today we are going to look at ways to make using Blender on a laptop more pleasant. We will also show how to turn on experimental mode in case you want to check out some of the more… in development features in Blender.
Using a Trackpad in Blender
Using Blender without a 3 button mouse is not really recommended but sometimes you have to get by with the tools you have available. There are a few ways however to make Blender work better with just a trackpad. The first thing we need to do is turn on 3 button mouse emulation. In Blender go to Edit->Preferences:
Now select the Input tab on the left, then choose Emulate 3 Button Mouse.
Now you can control most viewport options using your trackpad + key combinations.
ALT + LMB
Orbit Camera
ALT + SHIFT + LMB
Pan Camera
ALT + CTRL + LMB or Two Finger Swipe
Zoom Camera
In addition to these key/mouse combinations, there are now icons available for performing many of these tasks.
Emulating the Numberpad
Blender also relies heavily on the numberpad for changing cameras (1/3/7/9) or rotating the camera (2/4/6/8) and on laptops 15″ and smaller numberpads are becoming increasingly rare. In this case you have a few different options. First you can leave it as it is and use the on screen controls mentioned above. Otherwise you can turn on NumPad emulation. This turns your standard number row (1 through 0) across the top of your keyboard, into a virtual numberpad.
To enable NumPad emulation, return once again to the Input tab in preferences by selecting Edit->Preferences. This time you want to enable the Emulate Numpad option.
There is a major downside to this approach, in that the use of the 1/2/3 keys to switch editing modes between vertex, edge and face in edit mode will no longer work! So let’s look at how we remap those keys next!
Remapping Edit Mode Keys
Remapping keys is another feature in the trusty preferences dialog (Edit->Preferences). Now locate the Keymap tab on the left. On the right drill down to 3D View->Mesh->Mesh Global then locate Select Mode currently bound to key 1, 2 and 3. You can simply click the 1, then hit 1 again, and with Numpad Emulation enabled it will now show as Numpad 1.
Of course you also have the option of remapping those keys to any value you wish. Simply click the arrow to the left to drill down for more details.
Here you can select multiple key combos in addition to remapping the primary key in the sequence.
Enabling Experimental Features in Blender
Finally we are going to look at the process of enabling Experimental Mode, in case you want to take a walk on the wild side of cutting edge features. This is once again a setting in Edit->Preferences. This time choose the Interface tab, then select Developer Extras. This will cause a new tab to appear, the Experimental tab.
Clicking the new Experimental tab will bring you to a new dialog where you can turn experimental features off and on. For example in Blender 2.91 if you want to check out the new Sculpting brushes, enable “Tools with Missing Icons”
You can see a detailed step by step demonstration of all of these processes in the video below (or on Odysee).
