Tag: GameDev News

Unity have announced their Black Friday Sale for 2019… which is actually on Monday.  On Monday December 2nd 400 assets are going to be on sale for 50% off.  On each day leading up to Cyber Monday they have an individual asset on sale for 70% Off.  The limited time deals are:

Keep in mind you only have the single day to pick up each asset for 70% off, although I would assume most assets will also be available as part of the 50% off sale on Monday.  You can learn more about the sale and the assets involved in the video below.  The above links contain an affiliate code giving GFS a small commission, so thanks a ton if you use them!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbYoeRTIyh4&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News Unity

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There is another Humble Bundle of interest to game developers, this one is the Humble Music and Sound Effects for Games, Films, and Content Creators Bundle.  It is a collection of audio resources including music packs, special FX and voice overs.  As always the bundles are organized into pricing tiers, where if you buy a higher dollar value tier, you get all of the lower value tiers below it.

The tiers of this bundle are:

1$

• Cute GUI Sound Set
• Christmas Music Pack
• Christmas Ambience Pack
• Christmas SFX Pack
• Sassy Character Sidekick Voicepack
• Aggressive Female Celebratory Phrases
• Voice Over Young Male
• RTS Game Orc Troop Voice
• Game Jingles and 8-Bit Sound FX
• SHMUP Music Pack
• Casino SFX Pack Lite
• Home and Office SFX Pack Lite

13$

• Pirate Game Sounds Pack
• Horror Music Atmospheres
• Fantasy Game Sounds
• Evil Alien Tech Sound Pack
• Horror SFX Pack
• Short Female Interjections
• Sword & Knife SFX
• Horror & Halloween Character Voice Pack
• RTS Game Builder Goblin Voice
• RTS Game Hero Troop Voice
• RTS Game Hero Builder Voice
• WW2 Soldier Voices
• Retro Platformer SFX Pack
• 8Bit Brave Adventure 4 Pack
• Footstep Sounds

25$

• Mega Music Collection
• Dark Fantasy Studio Megapack
• Puzzle SFX Pack
• Puzzle Music Pack
• Zombie Voice Samples
• Cowboy Voice Samples
• Gun Sound Pack
• Sci Fi Sounds and Sci Fi Weapons
• Aggressive Female MOBA Style Voicepack
• Aggressive Female Guiding Voice Voicepack
• Fighting Game Announcer With Effects
• RPG Magic SFX Pack 2
• Casual Game SFX Pack
• Fantasy/RPG Music Pack
• RPG Battle Themes
• Pixel Platformer Music Pack

As with all Humble Bundles, you get to decide how your money is allocated, between the publisher, Humble, charity, or if you so choose (and thanks a ton if you do!) to support GameFromScratch using this link.  You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.  The license terms of the bundle are available here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUWPDAs5BKI&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News

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Two completely unrelated stories (beyond the Oculus commonality) in one today.  First, Unity and Oculus have teamed up to launch an 11 part, 20+ hour course on all aspects of creating a VR game using the Unity game engine with the Oculus Rift SDK and hardware.

Details from the Unity blog:

We’ve partnered with Oculus, to launch an extensive intermediate level course guiding you through all aspects of building a virtual reality (VR) game. As the VR industry continues to grow and mature, developers are asking more questions about making the switch to VR, and developers who already work in VR want to improve their skills. That’s why we teamed up with the experts at Oculus to build this comprehensive VR course, “Design, Develop, and Deploy for VR”.

In more than 20 hours of hands-on course content, you’ll learn about programming, user experience (UX) considerations for VR, optimization, launching your game and more. Twelve experts from Oculus and Unity give you in-depth lessons to help you build your own vertical slice (think, level of a game) of an escape room game. Plus, after you complete the course, you can submit your vertical slice for feedback from Oculus.

Even though this course is centered around creating a game, the principles and learnings apply to almost any type of VR content, whether you’re building practical business applications or immersive experiences as art or entertainment. You’ll find this course useful even if your interests go beyond making a game. 

The course is hosted on the Unity Learn platform.  You can learn more about Unity learn here.

In additional Oculus news, John Carmack (of id fame) has announced he is stepping down as CIO of Oculus.  His announcement came via Facebook post, excerpt below:

Starting this week, I’m moving to a “Consulting CTO” position with Oculus.

I will still have a voice in the development work, but it will only be consuming a modest slice of my time.

As for what I am going to be doing with the rest of my time: When I think back over everything I have done across games, aerospace, and VR, I have always felt that I had at least a vague “line of sight” to the solutions, even if they were unconventional or unproven. I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.

I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Thankfully John is leaving Facebook before working on artificial intelligence!  You can learn more about both announcements in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_Wpig8-6ko&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News VR Unity

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Back at GDC 2019, Crytek surprised the world with a demonstration that showcased real-time raytracing without the need for modern RTX enabled hardware.  Today CryTek released that benchmark into the wild.  You can learn more about the benchmark here.

CryTek did an in-depth interview describing the process of creating the benchmark available here:

Crytek has released a new video demonstrating the results of a CRYENGINE research and development project. Neon Noir shows how real-time mesh ray-traced reflections and refractions can deliver highly realistic visuals for games. The Neon Noir demo was created with the new advanced version of CRYENGINE’s Total Illumination showcasing real time ray tracing. This feature will be added to CRYENGINE release roadmap in 2019, enabling developers around the world to build more immersive scenes, more easily, with a production-ready version of the feature.

Neon Noir follows the journey of a police drone investigating a crime scene. As the drone descends into the streets of a futuristic city, illuminated by neon lights, we see its reflection accurately displayed in the windows it passes by, or scattered across the shards of a broken mirror while it emits a red and blue lighting routine that will bounce off the different surfaces utilizing CRYENGINE’s advanced Total Illumination feature. Demonstrating further how ray tracing can deliver a lifelike environment, neon lights are reflected in the puddles below them, street lights flicker on wet surfaces, and windows reflect the scene opposite them accurately.

Neon Noir was developed on a bespoke version of CRYENGINE 5.5., and the experimental ray tracing feature based on CRYENGINE’s Total Illumination used to create the demo is both API and hardware agnostic, enabling ray tracing to run on most mainstream, contemporary AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. However, the future integration of this new CRYENGINE technology will be optimized to benefit from performance enhancements delivered by the latest generation of graphics cards and supported APIs like Vulkan and DX12.

The benchmark is available on the Crytek Marketplace and requires you to have the CryEngine launcher installed.  You can check out the benchmark running on rather antiquated hardware (at a respectable clip!) in the video below.  According to the CryEngine Roadmap we should expect to see raytracing support (with or without hardware) in CryEngine 5.7, scheduled for a Spring 2020 release.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc_N86y6XaQ&w=853&h=480]

GameDev News CryEngine

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There is a new bundle of interest for game developers on Humble, this is the Humble Unreal Engine Game Development Bundle featuring GameDev.tv.  It’s a collection of courses and assets (as well as the games QUBE 1 and 2) for use with the Unreal game engine.  As always the bundle is split into different tiers, where you buy a higher dollar value tier, you get all of the tiers below it.

In this bundle the tiers are:

1$ Tier

• Unreal Cinematics Training Course
• Q.U.B.E
• Star Sparrow Modular Spaceship
• Another Stylized Material Collection 8

16$ Tier

• Math For Games Training Course
• Unreal C++ v4.1X Training Course
• QUBE 2
• Master Control Material
• Rusty Barrels Volume 2
• Another Easy Terrain Material

20$ Tier

• Unreal Multiplayer Training Course
• Unreal C++ 4.22 Training Course
• Unreal Blueprint Training Course
• Unreal VR Training Course
• Steampunk/Victorian Environment with Vehicles
• Gamemaster Audio – Prosound Mini Pack
• Slum Village Environment

As with all Humble Bundles, you can decide how your money is allocated between the publisher, humble, charity or if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS using this link.  Learn more about this bundle in the video below.

GameDev News Unreal

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