Organizers of the 19th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, the leading peer-based video game event celebrating the industry’s top games and developers, are excited to today announce this year’s nominees!

Winners in all categories will be honored at the Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA) ceremony, taking place on Wednesday, March 20, 2019 at 6:30pm at the San Francisco Moscone Center during the 2019 Game Developers Conference (GDC) and held in conjunction with the Independent Games Festival Awards (IGF).

Organizers are also announcing that the Game Developers Choice Awards will be hosted once again by Tim Schafer, LucasArts industry veteran and founder of Double Fine Productions (Psychonauts 2). Both GDCA and IGF Awards are available to attend for all GDC 2019 pass-holders, as well as streamed via http://twitch.tv/gdc & other to-be-announced streaming platforms.

The developer-picked GDCA nominations are led by Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 with a total of 7 nominations, followed closely by Sony Santa Monica’s God of War and Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-Man with a total of 6 nominations each. Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2, the sprawling adventure set in a richly detailed open world at the dusk of the Wild West era, received nominations for Best Audio, Best Design, Innovation Award, Best Narrative, Best Technology, Best Visual Art and Game of the Year.

Sony Santa Monica’s God of War, the epic new chapter of the influential action series that features stunning battles with gods and an involving tale of a father’s struggles guiding his son through an unforgiving world, was nominated for Best Audio, Best Design, Best Narrative, Best Technology, Best Visual Art and Game of the Year. Marvel’s Spider-Man, the acclaimed action-adventure game developed by Insomniac Games starring the beloved comic book character, was also nominated for Best Audio, Best Design, Best Narrative, Best Technology, Best Visual Art and Game of the Year.

Other titles receiving multiple nominations include the rewardingly challenging platformer, Celeste from Matt Makes Games, the innovative puzzle whodunnit game Return of the Obra Dinn from Lucas Pope’s 3909, the deeply immersive take on a classic puzzle game, Tetris Effect from Monstars, Resonair & Enhance, and the emotional tale of life and love, Florence from Mountains.

Any video game that was released and made publicly available during the 2018 calendar year, irrespective of platform or delivery medium, is eligible for free nomination for the 2019 Game Developers Choice Awards. Both nominees and winners are selected by the Game Developers Choice Awards-specific International Choice Awards Network (ICAN), which is an invitation-only organization, comprised of leading game creators from all parts of the industry.

The complete list of nominees, including honorable mentions, for the 19th annual Game Developers Choice Awards is as follows:

BEST AUDIO

Celeste (Matt Makes Games)

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games)

God of War (Sony Santa Monica / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Marvel’s Spider-Man (Insomniac Games / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Tetris Effect (Monstars and Resonair / Enhance)

Honorable Mentions: Beat Saber (Beat Games), Wandersong (Greg Lobanov / Humble Bundle), Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope / 3909), Battlefield V (EA DICE / Electronic Arts), Forza Horizon 4 (Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios  / Microsoft Studios)

BEST DEBUT

Polyarc (Moss)

Mountains (Florence)

Nomada Studio (Gris)

Villa Gorilla (Yoku’s Island Express)

Sabotage (The Messenger)

Honorable Mentions: Beat Games (Beat Saber), Digital Sun (Moonlighter), Two Point Studios (Two Point Hospital), Okomotive (Far: Lone Sails)

BEST DESIGN

Marvel’s Spider-Man (Insomniac Games / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Celeste (Matt Makes Games)

Into the Breach (Subset Games)

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games)

God of War (Sony Santa Monica / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Honorable Mentions: Frostpunk (11 bit studios), Minit (Kitty Calis, Jan Willem Nijman, Jukio Kallio & Dominik Johann / Devolver Digital), Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope / 3909), Astro Bot Rescue Mission (SIE Japan Studio / Sony Interactive Entertainment), Monster Hunter: World (Capcom)

BEST MOBILE GAME

Alto’s Odyssey (Snowman)

Florence (Mountains / Annapurna Interactive)

Reigns: Game of Thrones (Nerial / Devolver Digital)

Holedown (Grapefrukt Games)

Donut County (Ben Esposito / Annapurna Interactive)

Honorable Mentions: Furistas Cat Cafe (Runaway), The Room: Old Sins (Fireproof Studios), Pocket Run Pool (Zach Gage), Alphabear 2 (Spry Fox), Twinfold (Kenny Sun)

INNOVATION AWARD

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games)

Florence (Mountains / Annapurna Interactive)

Nintendo Labo (Nintendo EPD / Nintendo)

Tetris Effect (Monstars and Resonair / Enhance)

Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope / 3909)

Honorable Mentions: Minit (Kitty Calis, Jan Willem Nijman, Jukio Kallio & Dominik Johann / Devolver Digital), Celeste (Matt Makes Games), God of War (Sony Santa Monica / Sony Interactive Entertainment), Astro Bot Rescue Mission (SIE Japan Studio / Sony Interactive Entertainment), Moss (Polyarc), A Way Out (Hazelight Studios / Electronic Arts)

BEST NARRATIVE

Florence (Mountains/Annapurna Interactive)

God of War (Sony Santa Monica / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Marvel’s Spider-Man (Insomniac Games / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope / 3909)

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games)

Honorable Mentions: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey  (Ubisoft Quebec / Ubisoft), Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream / Sony Interactive Entertainment), Celeste (Matt Makes Games), Life is Strange 2 (Dontnod Entertainment / Square Enix), Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (Dim Bulb Games and Serenity Forge / Good Shepherd Entertainment)

BEST TECHNOLOGY

Marvel’s Spider-Man (Insomniac Games / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey  (Ubisoft Quebec / Ubisoft)

Forza Horizon 4 (Turn 10 Studios and Playground Games / Microsoft Studios)

God of War (Sony Santa Monica / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games)

Honorable Mentions: Sea of Thieves (Rare / Microsoft Studios), Far Cry 5 (Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Toronto / Ubisoft), Battlefield V (EA DICE / Electronic Arts), Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream / Sony Interactive Entertainment), Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope / 3909)

BEST VISUAL ART

Gris (Nomada Studio / Devolver Digital)

Marvel’s Spider-Man (Insomniac Games / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

God of War (Sony Santa Monica / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope / 3909)

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games)

Honorable Mentions: Battlefield V (EA DICE / Electronic Arts), Tetris Effect (Monstars and Resonair / Enhance), Dragon Ball FighterZ (Arc System Works / Bandai Namco Entertainment),  Assassin’s Creed Odyssey  (Ubisoft Quebec / Ubisoft), Below (Capybara Games)

BEST VR/AR GAME

Budget Cuts (Neat Corporation)

Beat Saber (Beat Games)

Tetris Effect (Monstars and Resonair / Enhance)

Moss (Polyarc)

Astro Bot Rescue Mission (SIE Japan Studio / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Honorable Mentions: Jurassic World Alive (Ludia), In Death (Sólfar Studios), Tendar (Tender Claws), Firewall Zero Hour (First Contact Entertainment / Sony Interactive Entertainment), Deracine (FromSoftware / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

GAME OF THE YEAR

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games)

Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope / 3909)

Marvel’s Spider-Man (Insomniac Games / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Celeste (Matt Makes Games)

God of War (Sony Santa Monica / Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Honorable Mentions: Tetris Effect (Monstars and Resonair / Enhance), Super Smash Bros Ultimate (Bandai Namco Studios & Sora / Nintendo), Into the Breach (Subset Games), Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Ubisoft Quebec / Ubisoft), Florence (Mountains / Annapurna Interactive), Monster Hunter: World (Capcom)

The Game Developers Choice Awards also recognize two individuals this year with annual Special Awards categories: Pioneer and Lifetime Achievement. The Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to esteemed writer and director, Amy Hennig, who has had a multifaceted career in game development, starting with development on the Atari 7800 and including roles as creative director and writer of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted game series. 

The recipient of the Pioneer Award will be announced in the near future. For more information about the 19th annual Game Developers Choice Awards, visit the GDCA website. Both the Game Developers Choice Awards and IGF ceremonies are available to attend for all GDC 2019 pass-holders.

Bring your team to GDC! Register a group of 10 or more and save 10 percent on conference passes. Learn more here.​

For more details on GDC 2019 visit the show’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

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If you’re a keen Warframe player who has been planning to transfer your PC account to Nintendo Switch, consider this a handy public service announcement: account migration ends on 15th January.

Warframe released on Nintendo Switch (to much praise, it has to be said) in November 2018, allowing players to get stuck into its free-to-play action on the go. The account migration feature was soon put in place to let users transfer their account from PC to the Switch – your PC account is still left safely intact, don’t worry – but you’ll need to act fast if you’re hoping to make use of it. The feature closes at 11am PT / 2pm ET (so that’s 7pm GMT / 8pm CET) on the date mentioned above.

If you still need to migrate your account, here are the steps you’ll need to follow:

– Download Warframe on your Nintendo Switch system, and make a Nintendo Switch Warframe account
– Authorize Linking your Account by accepting the prompt that appears when Warframe runs for the first time on your Nintendo Switch
– Log in here using your PC Account
– Go to the Account Management page
– Click “Migrate PC Account to Nintendo Switch” at the bottom of the page
– Be sure to read all text on the page that appears in order to understand all details surrounding your account migration
– Enter your PC Warframe Account password twice and hit the “confirm” button
– You will be redirected to a Nintendo sign-in page, click the “Sign In” button
– Enter the account credentials of the Nintendo Account you wish to copy your PC Warframe Account to finish migrating accounts.

Have you been enjoying Warframe on Switch? Let us know how you’ve been getting on down below in the comments.

Click Here!

He wants to play the game that plays you. Welcome @DannyDeVito to our JUMANJI cast! Can’t wait my friend. Oh the fun we will have, if... you just call out it’s name. #JUMANJI https://t.co/PJoTAqhHV1

— Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) January 5, 2019

Do you like playing videos in your web browser? Well, good news, the Chromium web browser available in Fedora gets a Video Acceleration API support. That makes video playback much smoother while using significantly less resources.

A little bit of history

Chromium with a VAAPI patch was already available on other distributions. But this was not the case with Fedora. I really want hardware acceleration. But my love for Fedora was holding me back. Then with sheer willpower, I joined Fedora and started maintaining a package in COPR.

I am not really a distro hopper but a DE hopper. I usually jump from Gnome to KDE and vice versa depending upon my mood. Then I started maintaining Chromium with vaapi patch on COPR. I was using the official patch which was submitted upstream for code review. I had very little hope that it will get merge. The patch is outdated and and try jobs were failing at that time.

After six months, the Chromium upstream maintainers made a statement that they are not interested to include this patch. So after that I started working on my own patch with referenced from the official patch. My patch is about using the existing flags that other operating system uses instead of creating a new flag just for experimentation.

Chromium uses AMDGPU’s UVD engine while playing a video

Chromium uses Existing flags on Fedora

Effects of the VAAPI patch

Chromium with this patch was extremely stable on both of my machines. They both have AMD GPU. The video playback is smooth. This improved overall power savings as well.

Credits: Tobias Wolfshappen

As you can see, chromium with the vaapi patch takes up significantly less resources in comparison to chromium without the patch and Firefox.  The CPU usage went down from 120% to 10%. The playback is smooth with no shuttering.

VA-API patch in chromium for Fedora

It was then Fedora’s Engineering Manager @ Red Hat and Chromium maintainer, Tom Callaway, finally recognises the VAAPI patch and decides to include in Fedora’s Chromium browser. Fedora becomes the second distribution to include the VAAPI patch in their official Chromium package.

By Joe Robinson 07 Jan 2019

Happy 2019! Here in the new year, we’re continuing our series on aliases. By now, you’ve probably read our first article on aliases, and it should be quite clear how they are the easiest way to save yourself a lot of trouble. You already saw, for example, that they helped with muscle-memory, but let’s see several other cases in which aliases come in handy.

Aliases as Shortcuts

One of the most beautiful things about Linux’s shells is how you can use zillions of options and chain commands together to carry out really sophisticated operations in one fell swoop. All right, maybe beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but let’s agree that this feature *is* practical.

The downside is that you often come up with recipes that are often hard to remember or cumbersome to type. Say space on your hard disk is at a premium and you want to do some New Year’s cleaning. Your first step may be to look for stuff to get rid off in you home directory. One criteria you could apply is to look for stuff you don’t use anymore. ls can help with that:

ls -lct

The instruction above shows the details of each file and directory (-l) and also shows when each item was last accessed (-c). It then orders the list from most recently accessed to least recently accessed (-t).

Is this hard to remember? You probably don’t use the -c and -t options every day, so perhaps. In any case, defining an alias like

alias lt='ls -lct'

will make it easier.

Then again, you may want to have the list show the oldest files first:

alias lo='lt -F | tac'

There are a few interesting things going here. First, we are using an alias (lt) to create another alias — which is perfectly okay. Second, we are passing a new parameter to lt (which, in turn gets passed to ls through the definition of the lt alias).

The -F option appends special symbols to the names of items to better differentiate regular files (that get no symbol) from executable files (that get an *), files from directories (end in /), and all of the above from links, symbolic and otherwise (that end in an @ symbol). The -F option is throwback to the days when terminals where monochrome and there was no other way to easily see the difference between items. You use it here because, when you pipe the output from lt through to tac you lose the colors from ls.

The third thing to pay attention to is the use of piping. Piping happens when you pass the output from an instruction to another instruction. The second instruction can then use that output as its own input. In many shells (including Bash), you pipe something using the pipe symbol (|).

In this case, you are piping the output from lt -F into tac. tac‘s name is a bit of a joke. You may have heard of cat, the instruction that was nominally created to concatenate files together, but that in practice is used to print out the contents of a file to the terminal. tac does the same, but prints out the contents it receives in reverse order. Get it? cat and tac. Developers, you so funny!

The thing is both cat and tac can also print out stuff piped over from another instruction, in this case, a list of files ordered chronologically.

So… after that digression, what comes out of the other end is the list of files and directories of the current directory in inverse order of freshness.

The final thing you have to bear in mind is that, while lt will work the current directory and any other directory…

# This will work:

lt

# And so will this:

lt /some/other/directory

… lo will only work with the current directory:

# This will work:

lo

# But this won't:

lo /some/other/directory

This is because Bash expands aliases into their components. When you type this:

lt /some/other/directory

Bash REALLY runs this:

ls -lct /some/other/directory

which is a valid Bash command.

However, if you type this:

lo /some/other/directory

Bash tries to run this:

ls -lct -F | tac /some/other/directory

which is not a valid instruction, because tac mainly because /some/other/directory is a directory, and cat and tac don’t do directories.

More Alias Shortcuts

• alias lll='ls -R' prints out the contents of a directory and then drills down and prints out the contents of its subdirectories and the subdirectories of the subdirectories, and so on and so forth. It is a way of seeing everything you have under a directory.
• mkdir='mkdir -pv' let’s you make directories within directories all in one go. With the base form of mkdir, to make a new directory containing a subdirectory you have to do this:
  

  mkdir newdir
  
  mkdir newdir/subdir
  
  

  Or this:

  mkdir -p newdir/subdir
  
  

  while with the alias you would only have to do this:

  mkdir newdir/subdir
  
  

  Your new mkdir will also tell you what it is doing while is creating new directories.

Aliases as Safeguards

The other thing aliases are good for is as safeguards against erasing or overwriting your files accidentally. At this stage you have probably heard the legendary story about the new Linux user who ran:

rm -rf /

as root, and nuked the whole system. Then there’s the user who decided that:

rm -rf /some/directory/ *

was a good idea and erased the complete contents of their home directory. Notice how easy it is to overlook that space separating the directory path and the *.

Both things can be avoided with the alias rm='rm -i' alias. The -i option makes rm ask the user whether that is what they really want to do and gives you a second chance before wreaking havoc in your file system.

The same goes for cp, which can overwrite a file without telling you anything. Create an alias like alias cp='cp -i' and stay safe!

Next Time

We are moving more and more into scripting territory. Next time, we’ll take the next logical step and see how combining instructions on the command line gives you really interesting and sophisticated solutions to everyday admin problems.