Core is a new game creation platform built upon Unreal Engine that recently went into open alpha release. Core is a game creation platform in a similar vein as Dreams, Roblox and Second Life. It comes packed out of the box with models, audio and materials and can be coded using the Lua programming language.
Core is described as:
Core is an endless universe of games and worlds designed by a global community of creators. It’s a radically accessible game construction kit, content exchange, and game-playing platform, all in one. With Core, you can create multiplayer games, using the power of Unreal Engine, with no coding or art skills required. When you’re ready to share your creations, publish them to the Core platform where they’ll be instantly available to play.
Core is in Open Alpha which means anyone can start building, sharing, and playing games. However, Core is not complete, and we will be adding several features and making improvements over time.
Plans exist to add monetization, enabling creators to make money with their Core creations. There is also the possibility that Core games will be publishable to other platforms, but for now Core games are published on the core website. Core is well documented for developers, with that documentation available here. Words do a poor job of describing Core, watch out the video below to see Core in action.
Welcome to another NewsFromScratch game development news round-up. Today we have 2 different game engine releases, a new asset pack from Kenney.nl, as well as an update to AssetForge.
Diligent Engine is a cross platform rendering framework that abstracts away the complexities of dealing with OpenGL, Vulkan, DirectX and Metal APIs. This new release adds Vulkan support for Android and more. You can learn more about Diligent Engine in our previous feature available here.
PlayCanvas just released a new version, 1.27. PlayCanvas is a complete 3D game engine with tooling that runs entirely in the browser. The 1.27 releases biggest new feature is a new procedural mesh generation API, enabling a huge swath of new functionality. You can learn more about PlayCanvas in our multipart tutorial available here or in video form here.
Kenney.nl have released another free 3d model asset pack around the concept of Nature, now with over 330 low polygon game ready assets. Additionally a new version of AssetForge was released, with improved sprite rendering features and more. AssetForge is a 3D modelling application that takes a kit-bashing appraoch. You can learn more about AssetForge here.
Learn more about all of these announcements in the video below.
This release of the Phaser open source HTML5 game framework brings an important milestone in reaching 100% coverage of the entire API, including private members. This task also resulted in better Typescript bindings as well. New features were also added to the framework, including a new Rope object for deformation effects.
The Defold game engine is a free and cross platform Lua powered game engine. It just received a minor update in the form of the 1.2.168 release, which includes the ability to run the engine while iconified, as well as finer tune control over URL handling. If you want to learn more about Defold, be sure to check out our Defold Crash Course tutorial hosted over on DevGa.me.
Verge3D is an engine for exporting Blender scenes to the web, while adding logic using their simple Puzzle system. This release adds support for VR Controllers, new Vector logic blocks, an improved physics engine including a new lighter and faster WebAssembly version and more. You can check out Verge3D for Blender in action here.
You can learn more about all three releases in the video below.
There is a new Humble Bundle available today of interest to game developers, specifically C# programmers. It is the C# & .NET CORE Humble Bundle by Packt Press, a collection of e-books and training videos around the subjects of C#, .NET Core, Azure and more.
As with all Humble Bundles, this one is split into tiers:
1$ Tier
· Hands-On Mobile Development with .NET Core
· Modernize ASP.NET Web Apps with Azure App Services
· Hands-On Network Programming with C# and .NET Core
· C# 8 Programming in 4 Hours (VIDEO)
· C# 8 and .NET Core 3.0 New Features (VIDEO)
8$ Tier
· Beginning ASP.NET Core 3.0
· C# 8 and .NET Core 3.0 (VIDEO)
· Hands-On Object-Oriented Programming with C#
· Hands-On Design Patterns with C# and .NET Core
· Learn Modern App Development with C# 8 and .NET Core 3.0 (VIDEO)
· Programming in C#: Exam 70-483(MCSD) Guide
· Hands-On Software Architecture with C# 8 and .NET Core 3
· Hands-On Parallel Programming with C# 8 and .NET Core 3
15$ Tier
· ASP.NET Core 3 and React
· ASP.NET Core 3 and Angular 9
· Hands-On RESTful Web Services with ASP.NET Core 3
· C# 8 and .NET Core 3 Projects using Azure
· Hands-On Domain-Driven Design with .NET Core
· Build a Real-World App with ASP.NET Core MVC
· Hands-On Web Development with ASP.NET and Angular 7
· C# and .NET Core 3.0
Buying a higher dollar value tier gets you all of the items in the lower priced tiers. As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your money is allocated, choosing between charity, the publisher, Humble or if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS purchasing using this link. You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.
The long running open source C++ framework Ogre just released Ogre 2.1 Baldur. Performance optimizations, a new compositor and shading system and more top the list of features.
Refactored Ogre 1.x to increase performance by several factors; using cache friendly techniques (Data Oriented Design), SIMD instructions, AZDO (Approaching Zero Driver Overhead), auto instancing, and multithreading
Windows Vista/7/8/10 support, macOS via Metal and OpenGL, iOS via Metal, Linux via OpenGL
Many new features: Area lights, Parallax Corrected Cubemaps, Forward Clustered lights, HDR, Exponential Shadowmaps and more
Ogre is open source under the MIT license and available here on GitHub. Learn more about Ogre and the 2.1 release in the video below.
There have been several minor stories in the world of game development. Too small to be covered on their own, but significant enough to be covered in this summary.
This week’s game development announcements include:
The Xenko open source game engine has just been renamed to Stride. This was due to Trademark issues with previous Xenko owners Silicon Studios. In addition to the Stride rename, we have been told to expect Xenko… er, Stride 4.0 shortly. You can learn more about Xenko/Stride here.
Another open source game engine, Corona from Corona Labs, has just been renamed to Solar2D. This name change is for obvious and unfortunate reasons. Additionally, they announced progress on their migration to a completely open source project. Learn more about the open sourcing of Corona/Solar2D here.
Godot have just released their showreel for 2020. In fact they just released 2, one for Desktop/Console and one for Mobile. Compiled from over 200 submissions, they highlight games in development using the Godot game engine.
Upon hitting 100K subscribers, we just launched the GameFromScratch official discord, and we have already got a community of 2K+ like minded game developers. Come join in the fun with this invite link. We have cake.
Learn more about all these stories in the video below. Also let me know what you think of this compilation format for minor game development news?
Beef is an in development programming language designed specifically for games and similar performance critical applications. This comment from Hacker News best sums up the intentions of the BEEF language:
Author here. I’m the engineering co-founder of PopCap Games. I left PopCap after the EA acquisition, and I’ve been working on this project mostly full-time for the last five years.
Before Beef, I was developing game code in C# and engine code in C++ and I felt C# was just much more pleasant to work with – faster compile times, better IDE tooling, better errors, etc. Then it struck me that none of the things I liked about C# really had anything to do with the JIT or the GC, and it may be possible to create a “best of” merging between C# and C++.
I know there are other “C replacement” contenders out there – the differences are probably best explained through Beef’s specific design goals listed at https://www.beeflang.org/docs/foreward/
Beef consists of a complete compiler tool chain built on an LLVM backend, as well as a full IDE with modern features such as refactoring and code completion as well as a complete debugger and profiler. It is available as a small (>100MB) download for Windows, or can be built from sources on Mac and Linux environments.
The Machinery by Our Machinery is a new game engine, currently in beta, by some of the creators of the Stingray/BitSquid game engine. It follows many of the same design prinicipals, being data driven, light weight and extended via a simple C interface. The Machinery is designed from day one to be a framework for creation of your own tools and features, essentially a game engine construction kit.
The Machinery is completely plugin-based. You can pick and choose the parts you need to customize it to your specific needs. You can extend the engine, and the editor, by writing your own plugins. You can even build completely new applications on top of our API, or embed our code into your existing applications or workflows.
Powerful editing model
The Machinery uses a powerful data model to represent edited assets. This model has built-in support for serialization, streaming, copy/paste, drag-and-drop as well as unlimited undo/redo. It supports an advanced hierarchical prefab model for making derivative object instances and propagating changes. It even has full support for real-time collaboration. Multiple people can work together in the same game project, Google Docs-style.
Since all of these features are built into the data model itself, your custom, game-specific data will get them automatically, without you having to write a line of code.
Easy to build tools
The Machinery uses an in-house, lightweight IMGUI framework that sits directly on top of our rendering system. The same UI system is used both by the editor and the runtime, making it possible to run the full editor UI inside a game or in VR. With The Machinery you no longer need watertight boundaries between the editor and the runtime, editing can be done inside the game itself, if you so like.
Using our drawing primitives, it is easy to create custom UI controls. And everything has been heavily optimized to feel snappy and responsive. In fact, the entire editor UI is rendered with just a single draw call.
Modern rendering architecture
The renderer has been designed to take full advantage of modern explicit graphic APIs like Vulkan, DX12 and Metal 2. You can reason explicitly about advanced setups such as multiple GPUs and GPU execution queues. Similar to the rest of the engine, the built-in rendering pipeline is easy to tweak and extend.
High performance
All the code in the engine is built based on data-oriented design principles. We focus on data flows and cache friendly memory layouts. All performance critical code is written to run as jobs, taking full advantage of the parallel processing power of modern CPUs.
Simplicity
The Machinery explicitly aims to be simple, minimalistic and easy to understand. In short, we want to be “hackable”. All our code is written in plain C, a significantly simpler language than modern C++. The entire code base compiles in less than a minute and we support hot-reloading of DLLs, allowing for fast iteration cycles.
Our APIs are exposed as C interfaces, which means they can easily be used from C, C++, D or any other language that has a FFI for calling into C code.
The Machinery is currently in invite only beta, write to them for access. Or you can check out an early build of The Machinery in action in the video below.
Today we are looking at TreeIt, a completely free Windows application for creating game textured and multi-LOD models in just a few seconds. TreeIt is made by Evolved Software and has the following features:
Very easy to create top quality 3D trees models.
Create any tree, not limited to just one tree type.
Edit each joint as well as break joints.
Render to image for leaf creation.
Adjustable LOD.
Exports to *.dbo *.fbx *.obj *.x .
Free.
While TreeIt ships with several textures making it easy to get started creating trees, you can also download several preconfigured trees from the tree library. Check out TreeIt in action in the video below, including a quick step by step tutorial on importing your model into the Godot game engine.
bforartists 2.0 was just released. bforartists is a fork of Blender aimed at making Blender more usable for artists, new users and indie developers with a series of changes including new keymaps, icons, workflow and completely new documentation.
Key changes over traditional Blender include:
custom key mapping
mouse only navigation (great for touch screens like the Surface)
widget manipulation with cursor off widget
keymaps can switch between BForArtists and Blender
theme has coloured icons and increased contrast
icons in menus, 2x more icons
removal of duplicate menus, if its in toolshelf, it’s not in the menu
menus for all hotkey only items (such as Text->Move Cursor)
reduced number of workspace templates
left aligned text in menus such as toolbox
lock camera to view icon
primitive toolbar in 3D viewport, customizable and dynamic to mode
bforartist targeted at beginners and indie developers, not pros
PDF manuals (WIP) with more detail, in PDFs
Learn more about the 2.0 release here. You can check out bforartists in action in the video below. The documentation is currently a WIP and is available here.
