Tag: GameDev News

PICO-8 is perhaps the most popular of the fantasy consoles and if you are extremely quick, you can pick it up as part of the Itch.io Racial Justice bundle along with a ton of other development tools and indie games.  PICO-8 is described as:

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. It feels like a regular console, but runs on Windows / Mac / Linux. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a commandline, a suite of cartridge creation tools, and an online cartridge browser called SPLORE.

It emulates a very limited virtual machine:

Display
128×128 16 colours

Cartridge Size
32k

Sound
4 channel chip blerps

Code
Lua

Sprites
256 8×8 sprites

Map
128×32 cels

Additionally PICO-8 has several built in tools including a sprite editor, sound editor, level editor and music editor, as well as tools for publishing and sharing your creations with out.  The underlying programming language is Lua and is documented here.  You can check out PICO-8 in action in the video below.

GameDev News Lua

In a post-Covid world, Epic Games are joining the GDC conference in going online this summer.  Unlike GDC however, Unreal Fest is completely free to attend!

Details from the Unreal Website:

Coming to you from the comfort of your own home on Tuesday, July 14, Unreal Fest Online is a free one-day virtual event that brings together Unreal Fest and Unreal Academy to offer an exciting and informative program of sessions that’s open to everyone.

Unreal Engine creators can choose between five content tracks: architecture; automotive; games; film, TV & live events; and cross-industry. With a choice of sessions for each timeslot in each track, there are over 50 sessions in total, and each session includes a live Q&A.

Creators across all industries are invited to come together to hear about the latest Unreal Engine developments (including more on what’s coming in UE5), learn new techniques and skills, and watch inspirational speakers from companies like Audi, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Rocksteady Studios, and Zero Density reveal how they use Unreal Engine in their projects.

Whether you’re a game developer, architect, engineer, designer, artist, producer, or cinematographer, if you create with Unreal Engine or are thinking about getting started, Unreal Fest Online is for you.

As mentioned earlier, GDC is also online this year with a $299 early bird all access price.  GDC will run from August 4th – August 6th.  Details of both online events is available in the video below.

GameDev News Unreal

Unity have just released Unity 2019.4 LTS, or Long Term Support.  This is a version of Unity that is only going to receive bug and security fixes going forward, making it the most stable and ideal version of Unity to start new Unity projects on.

Details on the 2019 LTS release from the Unity blog:

As part of our commitment to improving the development process for users, Unity is now shifting to offering LTS as the default version of the platform, and we have committed to doing fewer releases per year. You have been incredible in helping us understand your needs and we’re grateful for your feedback. In response to this we have improved, and will continue to improve, workflows and modernize Unity to be more flexible, focusing on delivering stability and interoperability of features.

Beginning today with the release of 2019 LTS, the LTS versions of Unity will become the default available for download from the Unity Hub. Moving forward, Unity will issue up to two TECH stream releases per year followed by the annual LTS release. The TECH Stream is for creators who demand to be on the cutting edge as technologies and workflows are evolving, while LTS is suggested for creators aiming to ship their projects in the near future, or for those who have everything they need in 2019 LTS. This shift in release philosophy will ensure that you are installing the most stable version for projects in production.

What’s in the 2019 LTS?

The new Long-Term Support (LTS) version of Unity contains everything from the previous three TECH stream releases with all the fixes and improvements we added to Unity 2019.3.0 since it was released. Similar to our previous LTS releases the focus for 2019 LTS isn’t new features, API changes or enhancements, but defect rectification and usability upgrades aimed at improving the stability of the product. In short, it’s a continuation of the 2019 TECH stream without new features which is why we also call it Unity 2019.4.0.

You can download Unity 2019.4 LTS in the Unity Hub or on the LTS support page here.  Learn more about Unity 2019.4LTS in the video below.

GameDev News Unity

Cesium, the makers of Cesium Ion and the open source CesiumJS open world data technologies have just announced they received an Epic Megagrant.  This will enable them to create Cesium for Unreal Engine, a free and open source add-on for Unreal Engine that will enable developers to use their 3D Tile world data in games and applications developed directly in UE.

Details of the MegaGrant win on the Cesium blog:

I can’t think of anything that better exemplifies Cesium’s belief in combining geospatial and 3D computer graphics than the support of Epic Games and the Epic MegaGrants program to build Cesium for Unreal Engine.

This marks the first time a full-scale, high-precision 3D globe is plugged into a leading game engine, opening a world of possibilities for Unreal’s users. Together we will advance training & simulation, architecture, games, AR/VR, autonomous driving, and other industries by enabling 3D Tiles to be streamed into Unreal for accurate visualization of real-world locations captured by satellites and drones—using the same 3D geospatial knowledge that has gone into CesiumJS for nearly a decade.

You can learn more about Cesium, the MegaGrant program and more in the video below.

GameDev News Unreal