Tag: GameDev News

Humble have just released a bundle targeted as musicians.  The Humble Music Producer Bundle is a collection of sound banks and VSTs.  As with all Humble Bundles it is organized into tiers:

1$ Tier

• Angelicals
• Frontier
• AAS Player (Note, this is available free)

15$ Tier

• Analog Essentials
• UltraFX
• Kitnetix
• Journeys

20$ Tier

• Strum Sessions
• Lounge Lizard Sessions
• Ultra Analog Session

This bundle gives you a key that you redeem as a single download from https://www.applied-acoustics.com/.  As with all Humble Bundles you can decide how your money is allocated, between charity, the publisher, Humble and if you choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS if purchased using this link.  You can learn more about this bundle including briefly seeing the 20$ Tier items in action in the video below.

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GameDev News Sale

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Serif, the makers of Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo are currently offering all of their products at a 50% discount.  Additionally they are now offering a completely functional 3 month demo download.

Full details from the Affinity announcement:

With all that’s going on right now due to the COVID-19 pandemic and in response to the many stories we’re hearing from the creative community about how they’re being severely impacted, we felt it was our responsibility to try to offer as much support as possible during this incredibly difficult time.

That’s why we’ve put in place three new measures which we hope will help at least some of you out there. These are:

• + A new 90-day free trial of the Mac and Windows versions of the whole Affinity suite
• + A 50% discount for those who would rather buy and keep the apps on Mac, Windows PC and iPad
• + A pledge to engage more than 100 freelance creatives for work, spending the equivalent of our annual commissioning budget in the next three months (more details of this will be announced soon).

The introduction of the 90-day free trial and deeply discounted pricing is done in the hope that this will make life a little easier for people who rely on creative software to make a living, but may be stuck at home without their usual tools, or for students who might not have access to their Affinity apps on their personal devices.

In addition, by increasing our spend on commissioning work from freelancers we can also put some extra money into a part of the industry which will be particularly affected.

We plan to make the free trial and additional discount available until 20 April, but we’ll continue to review the situation as time goes on.

We know we’re not saving the world, but we hope these measures can at least provide some form of relief to those who need it. We’ll pull through this together…

You can learn more about the deal and promo in the video below.  If you want to learn more about Affinity products check out our hands on video available here.

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GameDev News Tools

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Epic Games have just announced a massive giveaway of asset packs from Project Nature.  This is a collection of trees, bushes, grasses and controlling blueprints for creating nature scenes in your Unreal Engine games.

Details from the Unreal Engine blog:

In collaboration with Project Nature, Epic Games has released over 20 environment and vegetation products for free on the Unreal Engine Marketplace.

The collection includes over 75 varieties of plant species, many of which were photoscanned from real-world vegetation, ranging from towering trees to the smallest of ground plants and flowers. Create a refreshing oasis retreat, escape to a serene meadow, or adorn a warm desert landscape for your audience to explore; with more than 550 optimized models, the sky, or the ground, is the limit on what you can grow!

The pack consists of:

• Hundreds of optimized plant models and materials
• The shader-based Project Nature Wind System 2.0
• The Project Nature Interaction System 2.0, including replicated animations
• A dynamic low-poly grass system
• A dynamic ivy creation pack
• And more!

You can download the assets using the Epic Game Launcher or via the website available here.  There is no time limit on this giveaway, all 21 packs are available free forever.  If you want to learn how to export from Unreal Engine to another engine or tool (such as Blender) you can learn more here.  Learn more about the asset giveaway in the video below.

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GameDev News Unreal

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Found yourself with a lot of free time on your hands lately?  Yeah, you’re not alone.  Why not spend the time improving your programming ability, which is exactly what you can do with the Software Development by O’Reilly bundle on now.  A collection of e-Books on a broad range of subjects including better programming habits, test driven design, algorithms and design patterns.  As always this bundle is organized into tiers:

1$ Tier

• Technology Strategy Patterns
• Apprenticeship Patterns
• 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
• The Art of Readable Code
• Algorithms in a Nutshell

8$ Tier

• Test-Driven Development with Python
• Introduction to Machine Learning
• Becoming a Better Programmer
• Regular Expressions Cookbook
• Head First Agile

15$ Tier

• Learning CoreDNS
• Programming Quantum Computers
• Cloud Native
• Real-World Software Development
• Head First Design Patterns

All of the books are available in PDF, MOBI and EPUB formats.  As with all Humble Bundles you can decide how your money is allocated, between the publisher, Humble, charity and if you choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS using this link.  You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.

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GameDev News Sale

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At not-GDC this year, DirectX 12 Ultimate was announced.  DirectX 12 Ultimate is a new baseline version of Direct X for new Xbox consoles and PC’s, to make development as easy as possible.  In addition to existing features including DirectX Raytracing and Variable Rate Shading, Ultimate includes the new features of Mesh Shaders and Sampler Feedback.

Details of DirectX 12 Ultimate from the Microsoft developer blog:

Microsoft’s Game Stack exists to bring developers the tools they need to create bold, immersive game experiences, and DX12 Ultimate is the ideal tool to amplify gaming graphics. DX12 Ultimate is the result of continual investment in the DirectX 12 platform made over the last five years to ensure that Xbox and Windows 10 remain at the very pinnacle of graphics technology. To further empower game developers to create games with stunning visuals, we enhanced features that are already beginning to transform gaming such as DirectX Raytracing and Variable Rate Shading, and have added new major features such as Mesh Shaders and Sampler Feedback.

Together, these features represent many years of innovation from Microsoft and our partners in the hardware industry. DX12 Ultimate brings them all together in one common bundle, providing developers with a single key to unlock next generation graphics on PC and Xbox Series X.

Of course, even the most powerful features are of limited use without the tools necessary to fully exploit them, so we are pleased to announce that our industry-leading PIX graphics optimization tool and our open-source HLSL compiler will provide game developers with the ability to squeeze every last drop of performance out of an entire ecosystem of DX12 Ultimate hardware.

NVidia are currently the only video card maker with DX12 Ultimate compatible devices detailed here.  AMD however are the company behind the GPU of the next generation XBox and will be supporting DX12U in their upcoming RDNA 2 hardware.

If you are interested in learning more about DirectX 12 Ultimate you can start with the Getting Started guide available here.  You can learn more about the release in the video below.

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GameDev News

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With so many people stuck at home due to the quarantines around the COVID-19 virus, Unity technologies have released Unity Learn Premium for free to developers for the next few months.  Unity Learn Premium is a great source of Unity tutorials, courses, lessons and projects and even included non-Unity related content on topics such as Max and Maya.  You can learn more about Unity Learn in our prior hands-on video.

Details from the State of Unity 2020:

As the world continues to change, we are committed to helping all of you learn new skills and capabilities that can help bring your vision to life. We are pleased to announce that we are giving everyone complimentary access to Unity Learn Premium starting today through June 20. Just log in to access live sessions with Unity experts and more than 350 hours of bite-sized tutorials, hands-on projects, and in-depth courses for game developers and any creator that can benefit from the power of real-time technology. This includes everything from Game Mechanic Design Fundamentals to Getting Started with Post-Processing Stack for VR. Additionally, we are delivering Create with Code Live, live virtual classes taught by Unity experts for students, educators, and anyone who wants to learn how to code, starting on Monday, March 23.

Even if you are an existing Premium subscriber, Unity have you covered there, having released the following email:

Monthly Subscribers
We are pausing your monthly payments for three months, from March 19 until June 20. If your payment date falls within this period, you will not be charged for Unity Learn Premium. You don’t need to do anything – we’ll take care of it.

Annual Subscribers
We are adding three months of access to your Unity Learn Premium subscription. For example, if your subscription is scheduled to renew on October 1, 2020, it will now renew on January 1, 2021. No action is required on your part; we’ll automatically shift your renewal date.

30-day Trial Subscribers
If you are currently in a trial period and want to continue using Learn Premium past this trial period, we will waive your monthly payments through June 20.

Class move by Unity in these troubling times.  You can learn more about the announcement in the video below.

GameDev News Unity

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In continuing not-GDC news, Unity have just released Unity 2020.1 beta.  This beta continues the trend of moving more and more functionality into packages, including new code performance and analysis tools, support for Visual Studio and VS Code and more.  Additionally 2D physics was improved, raytracing support was added and more.

Details from the Unity blog:

The Unity 2020.1 beta is a milestone in the development cycle of the first TECH stream release this year, one of two 2020 TECH stream releases that lead up to the 2020 Long-Term Support (LTS) release next year.

As a token of our appreciation, everyone who tries out the 2020.1 beta and submits at least one bug report gets a chance to win one of four NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 2080 graphic cards. See the end of this post for details on the prize draw.

On April 20, we will be hosting a webinar for people interested in a guided tour of the features and updates in this beta. You can register here and find more information at the bottom of this post.

To get started, download the Unity 2020.1 beta from the Unity Hub or from our beta page. We recommend that you check out the beta to evaluate the technology while planning your future development, and don’t use it to work on projects that are live or in production. As always, make sure you back up existing projects before you test them with beta and Preview technology. Read our guide for more details.

For more complete details be sure to check out the video below.  If you are interested in the Physics2D samples mentioned in the video, it is available here on GitHub.

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GameDev News Unity

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Today at not-GDC, Khronos Group announced the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing, with initial support via beta drivers to NVidia cards.

Details from the Vulkan announcement:

Vulkan Ray Tracing consists of a number of Vulkan, SPIR-V, and GLSL extensions, some of which are optional. The primary VK_KHR_ray_tracing extension provides support for acceleration structure building and management, ray tracing shader stages and pipelines, and ray query intrinsics for all shader stages. VK_KHR_pipeline_library provides the ability to provide a set of shaders which can be efficiently linked into ray tracing pipelines. VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations enables intensive driver operations, including ray tracing pipeline compilation or CPU-based acceleration structure construction to be offloaded to application-managed CPU thread pools.

Vulkan Ray Tracing shaders are SPIR-V binaries which use two new extensions. The SPV_KHR_ray_tracing SPIR-V extension adds support for ray tracing shader stages and instructions; SPV_KHR_ray_query adds support for ray query shader instructions. Developers can generate those binaries in GLSL using two new GLSL extensions, GLSL_EXT_ray_tracing and GLSL_EXT_ray_query, which are supported in the open source glslang compiler. Engineers at Khronos member companies, including NVIDIA, have also added support for the SPIR-V extensions to DXC, Microsoft’s open source HLSL compiler, enabling Vulkan Ray Tracing SPIR-V shaders to be authored in HLSL using the syntax defined by Microsoft, with minimal modifications.

Beta drivers are available from NVidia here although it should be cautioned, these drivers are very much for developers only!  You can read more about the announcement in this 20 page pdf presentation, as well as a more in-depth technical overview of raytracing support in this blog post.

You can learn more about raytracing support in Vulkan in the video below.

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GameDev News 3D

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