Category: Game Releases

New game releases.

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Free Ray Tracing Gems Book

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

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    Review: Partia 3: Knight of Partia

    You may never read another app description as resigned as Partia 3’s. The developer, Dustin, laments the financial failures of the previous two entries, the cost of his vacations and weekends to the creation of this final chapter in the trilogy, and the likely mediocre response the new game will generate. Declaring it the ‘last app store description he will ever write,’ he signs it: “For the lovers only.”

    The Parthia series is the creation of a devoted two-person team who have been making console-style strategy RPGs with no IAP for seven years with little reward to show for it. For that alone it’s worth a look – although unless you’re a strategy RPG die-hard, maybe not much more than a look.partia 3 4

    The first Partia came out in 2012 and Partia 2 followed in 2014. Five years later, the labor of love is finally complete. Unfortunately, in that time, not much has advanced in the games’ design. Many of the criticisms given in PT’s review of the first game in the series still hold true even seven years later. Now, you do have touch controls rather than an on-screen controller, and the field isn’t pillarboxed into an approximation of a Game Boy Advance aspect ratio. But the UI is still frustrating, and the graphics and animations are limited. It would be nice if the gameplay made up for that.

    The Parthia series has always been a devoted homage to Fire Emblem , which is known for its handheld titles on Nintendo platforms. Now there is an official Fire Emblem game on mobile, and a very popular one, albeit not the one fans were probably hoping for. Fire Emblem: Heroes reduced the size of the battlefield and dropped the series’ signature character permadeath. Parthia, on the other hand, is orthodox in its presentation of traditional strategy RPG gameplay. Your units move freely around the large battlefields. They can carry different equipment, gain levels, and have their individual advantages and weaknesses. In between battles, you can manage your army, buying and selling equipment and recruiting new soldiers. Most importantly, permadeath remains a threat, encouraging you to play carefully with your favorite characters.partia 3 1

    However, battles are tedious. First, it takes a dozen taps to enter a simple command. Tap to select the unit. Tap to choose move. Tap to choose attack. Tap to choose the weapon. Tap to choose the target. Tap to confirm. Watch the animation. And that’s after turning off the default setting that requires double taps for each of those commands! Then, units too-frequently miss their targets or do little damage, making each battle a war of slow attrition. The AI does little to help the pace, preferring to wait to be attacked or otherwise being easily lured into bottlenecks and slowly whittled down one by one. Further, Parthia 3 doesn’t do a good job of teaching the player the capabilities of the units, instead leaving the education up to trial and error. I’m still not 100% sure which units are supposed to be strong against which, or if there even is a big difference between them. The AI is never a threat unless a story event demands overwhelming enemy forces.partia 3 2

    Battles are often driven by story events, which push some drama onto the map by suddenly manifesting new enemy or allied units. The story remains forgettable, although commendable in its ambition. It’s trying to tell an epic tale of war and justice, but the large and thinly-drawn cast makes it hard to get a handle on why you should care. Not helping the narrative is the poor English used, which features grammatical or spelling errors in every other dialogue box. It’s not enough to make comprehension impossible, but it is enough to be frustrating to read and drop you out of the tale.

    Devotees of the console strategy RPG style of Fire Emblem may find a lot to like in Parthia 3 and its prequels, especially those disappointed by Nintendo’s limited Fire Emblem: Heroes. This series was created by someone with a lot of love for a very particular kind of game. Now that the creator is freed of this obsession, I hope his next project can find the audience it deserves.

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    Changes to Video Content on Steam

    For the past few years, we have worked on expanding Steam beyond games and software by building a video platform that supports paid and free video content. In reviewing what Steam users actually watch, it became clear we should focus our effort on offering content that is either directly related to gaming or, is accessory content for games or software sold on Steam.

    As part of this refocus, we have retired the Video section of the Steam Store menu with an expectation that video content is discovered via the associated game or software store page, or through search, user tags, recommendations, etc.

    Over the coming weeks a number of non-gaming videos will be retired and will no longer be available for purchase. Previously purchased content will remain available to owners.

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    Humble Fantasy GameDev Bundle

    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:

    image

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

    GameDev News

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    You have 24 hours to vote in the 15th IMGA – have your say

    By Joe Robinson 19 Feb 2019

    It’s a bit of a slow week for us at the moment, but fear not, we’ve got reviews coming tomorrow and Thursday to tide you over before another Weekender update. In the meantime, I thought we could go for something a little different today.

    IMGA have announced the nominees for their 15th International Mobile Game Awards, and for the next 24 hours the public is being given a say via the Public Choice Award.

    There’s a total of 153 nominees available, and you can only vote for one game out of the bunch – voting will end at 4PM GMT tomorrow. There’s a lot of names to sift through, but here are few PT favourites that you could vote for if you wanted to:

    • Alphabear 2, English word puzzle, Spry Fox LLC, United States
    • Alto’s Odyssey, Team Alto, United Kingdom
    • Donut County, Ben Esposito, United States
    • ELOH, jcstranger / Salon Alpin / Broken Rules, Austria
    • Kingdom Rush Vengeance, Ironhide Game Studio, Uruguay
    • One More Button, Tommy Søreide Kjær, Norway
    • Rebel Inc., Ndemic Creations, United Kingdom
    • Reigns: Game of Thrones, DevolverDigital, United States
    • The Room: Old Sins, Fireproof Games, United Kingdom

    Please do check the full list if you can find the time though – there’s plenty of other games there (including Fortnite & PUBG Mobile, as it happens). The main awards, like the Grand Prix, will be decided by a panel of experts.

    Along with these ‘Global’ awards, the IMGA runs regional awards in China, the MENA area and South-East Asia. If you’re interested you can look up past winners (which include games like Monument Valley and Tokaido) here.

    All of the winners of this year’s awards, including Public Choice, will be announced on March 19th.