In the most recent release of Unity 2017.2 Beta, Unity added a new feature for interactive tutorials.  Basically these are step by step beginner tutorials that run directly in the Unity engine and introduce basic concepts like running your scene or present scenarios where you need to fix a problem within an existing project.  They are accessible in the Learn tab when you first launch Unity.

If you want more information, I take a hands on look at this new feature in this video:

Again, you need to be running Unity 2017.2 beta or higher in order to have access to the interactive tutorials.  You can download the latest beta here.

One very cool thing the Blender foundation have started doing is offering guidance and early builds of future releases.  The next major update to Blender is Blender 2.8 and you can learn more about (and download) it at this location.  Be aware this is a VERY early release… this isn’t a beta or even alpha, this is a developer work in progress build and it crashes, a lot.  There’s also no guarantee that features actually make it into the final release, nor that there wont be massive changes.  Without a doubt it isn’t suitable for production work, you have been warned.  Also, going forward Blender is going to require an OpenGL 3.2 or higher capable video card, you will understand why shortly.

So then, why am I excited about this release?  Well it’s got several new features that are going to be great and a lot of this release is actually foundational.  Changes to the low level guts of Blender that will make it a better product going forward.  Additionally new grease pencil improvements are going to make Blender an excellent choice for 2D animators, you can check out a preview of the changes here.  Changes are also coming to workspaces and layers making the UI more customizable and hopefully more productive. 

All that said, the star feature coming to Blender, as well as the one most useful to game developers, is the updated viewport.  Blender is now getting two new viewport renderers, Eevee and Clay.  Eevee propels Blender forward into the modern age, allowing real time rendering of PBR scenes with realistic lighting.  In a nutshell, your game should look exactly the same in Blender as it does in Unreal Engine or Unity.  Words can’t really justify how impressive this new viewport renderer is, so instead I made a video.  You can check it out here or embedded below.

Today the Blender Foundation announced the release of Blender 2.79.  Other than a load of bug fixes, there isn’t actually a ton in the release directly for game developers.  Perhaps the biggest feature is the new PBR shader node, implemented as the Principled BSDF node based on Disney’s PBR implementation in Renderman.  Other new features include Denoise is a new feature for removing rendering noise, a new Filmic view transform has been added for more photorealistic rendering results, improved OpenCL performance as well as various Cycles renderer improvements.  The Grease pencil also received several improvements in this release including per layer onion skinning and new interpolation tools. 

Perhaps the single best improvement of this release to me personally is automatic DPI scaling.  This means Blender will automatically detect if you are using a high DPI monitor and adjust it’s UI accordingly.  No more having to manually change the user interface each time you plug in an external monitor!

The 2.79 release also includes a ton of new add-ons, including:

Dynamic Sky, Archipack, Magic UV, Mesh Edit Tools, Skinify, Display Tools, Brush Menus, Btrace, Is Key Free, Turnaround Camera, Auto Mirror, Camera Rigs, Snap Utils Line, Add Advanced Objects, Export Paper Model, Kinoraw Tools, Stored Views, Render Clay, Auto Tracker, Refine Tracking Solution, Materials Library VX, Mesh Tissue, Cell Fracture Crack It

Be warned however, there was a change to the way add-ons work with data, meaning that backward .blend compatibility may be impacted!

To read more details of this release check the full release announcement available here.  If you are interested in learning Blender, we have a ton of great tutorials available here.

The Xenko game engine just released version 2.1.  This recently out of beta C# powered game engine just got a bunch prettier with several rendering improvements.  The engine also gained the ability to stream textures which should decrease scene load times and memory usage.  The input system was rewritten and Direct X 12 support was improved.

The following is a summary of new features in the 2.1 release:

• Local reflections
• Clear coat shading
• Thin glass materials
• Texture streaming
• Render masks
• Improved profiler
• Debug text during runtime
• Rewritten input system
• Improved Direct3D 12 support
• Improved environment fresnel
• Japanese documentation now available

For more details be sure to check out the release notes which includes a full change log.

Xenko was previously known as Paradox and we did a short tutorial series available here if you wish to learn more.

The Defold Engine just got it’s own community hub, available at defold.com/community.  In addition to the existing forums and social media pages, the community portal now includes an asset portal and a community games showcase.

The Asset portal currently contains just under 30 different projects including new project templates, to Unity Ad plugins and UI systems.  The system also enables authenticated users to upload their own assets.  The new Games page showcases games made using the Defold game engine and also includes the ability to upload your own titles.  The look is very polished, although the icons used right now are rather large requiring a fair bit of scrolling.  Hopefully as the site gets more populated, the sizes are dialed back a little bit for efficiencies sake.

Defold is a free 2D Lua powered game engine.  If you are interested in learning more, we have a complete tutorial series available here.

Some time back Microsoft launched the UWP, Universal Windows Platform, a target enabling you to create Windows store apps that could also be run on XBox One hardware.  There was however a big catch, limited resources.  From the UWP documentation:

• The maximum memory available to an app running in the foreground is 1 GB.

  • The maximum memory available to an app running in the background is 128 MB.

  • Apps that exceed these memory requirements will encounter memory allocation failures. For more information about monitoring memory use, see the MemoryManager class reference.

• Share of 2-4 CPU cores depending on the number of apps and games running on the system.

• Share of 45% of the GPU depending on the number of apps and games running on the system.

• UWP on Xbox One supports DirectX 11 Feature Level 10. DirectX 12 is not supported at this time.

• All apps must target the x64 architecture in order to be developed or submitted to the store for Xbox.

So, basically you got access to half of an Xbox One…  Bummer.  Thankfully in the upcoming Fall Update, that is all about to change!  From the Microsoft blog:

Since the advent of consoles, developers have asked for ways to create games for one platform that you could run anywhere. With the release of the Expanded Resources feature in the Windows Fall Creators Update, we are taking the industry closer to that goal than it has ever been before. Now, developers will automatically have access to 6 exclusive cores, 5 GB of ram and full access to the GPU!

Awesome!  I have a video discussing this change available here.

LWJGL, the Light Weight Java Game Library, just released version 3.1.2.  LWJGL is a series of Java bindings for several underlying media APIs such as OpenGL, OpenAL and Vulkan.  This release also added OpenVR and OpenEXR support among other changes and fixes.

Details from the release notes:

This build includes the following changes:

Bindings

• Added OpenVR bindings.
• Added Tiny OpenEXR bindings.
• Added Yoga bindings.
• bgfx: Updated to API version 41 (up from 34)
• glfw: Updated to pre-release 3.3.0 version (up from 3.2.1). Includes many fixes and new features:
  • Last error code query (glfwGetError)
  • Requesting attention from the user (glfwRequestWindowAttention)
  • Platform dependent scancodes for keys (glfwGetKeyScancode)
  • Window maximization events (glfwSetWindowMaximizeCallback)
  • Window attribute modification (glfwSetWindowAttrib)
  • Joystick hats (glfwGetJoystickHats)
  • Library initialization hints (glfwInitHint)
  • Headless OSMesa backend
  • Cursor centering control (GLFW_CENTER_CURSOR)
  • macOS: Cocoa hints (GLFW_COCOA_RETINA_FRAMEBUFFER, GLFW_COCOA_FRAME_AUTOSAVE, GLFW_COCOA_GRAPHICS_SWITCHING, GLFW_COCOA_CHDIR_RESOURCES, GLFW_COCOA_MENUBAR)
  • macOS: Vulkan support via MoltenVK
  • X11: Moved to XI2 XI_RawMotion for disabled cursor mode motion input
  • EGL: Added support for EGL_KHR_get_all_proc_addresses and EGL_KHR_context_flush_control
• jemalloc: Updated to 4.5.0 (up from 4.4.0)
• LibOVR: Update to 1.14.0 (up from 1.10.0)
• lmdb: Updated to 0.9.20 (up from 0.9.18)
• NanoVG: Added support for fallback fonts.
• nuklear: Updated to 1.37.0 (up from 1.29.1, with the new versioning)
• OpenAL: Added AL_SOFT_source_resampler extension.
• stb
  • Updated stb_dxt to 1.0.6 (up from 1.0.4)
  • Updated stb_easy_font to 1.0 (up from 0.7)
  • Updated stb_image to 2.15 (up from 2.13)
  • Updated stb_image_resize to 0.94 (up from 0.91)
  • Updated stb_image_write to 1.05 (up from 1.02)
  • Updated stb_perlin to 0.3 (up from 0.2)
  • Updated stb_rect_pack to 0.11 (up from 0.10)
  • Updated stb_truetype to 1.15 (up from 1.12)
  • Updated stb_vorbis to 1.10 (up from 1.09)
• tinyfiledialogs: Updated to 2.8.3 (up from 2.7.2)
• Vulkan: Updated to 1.0.49 (up from 1.0.38)

Improvements

• MemoryStack: Increased default stack size to 64kb (up from 32kb)
• Shared library loading can now utilize a ClassLoader specified by the caller. (#277)
• Significantly reduced DEBUG_MEMORY_ALLOCATOR and DEBUG_STACK overhead in Java 9 using the new StackWalker API.
• Migrated windows builds to appveyor and updated to Visual Studio 2017 (up from 2015)
• EGL: The core API now includes javadoc links to the Khronos references pages
• OpenGL ES: The core API now includes javadoc links to the Khronos references pages

Fixes

• Assimp: Struct member nullability fixes
• Linux: Removed dependencies to newer GLIBC versions.
• LibOVR: Fixed layout of the ovrInputState struct.
• OpenAL: Removed buffer auto-sizing from alcCaptureSamples. The number of samples must now be specified explicitly, similar to alcRenderSamplesSOFT.
• Vulkan: Function addresses are now retrieved only once, using the optimal method for each function type.
  • This avoids warnings on pedantic validation layers.
• Fixed callback invocation bugs on 32-bit architectures.
• Fixed various javadoc formatting issues (#308)

Breaking Changes

• Mapped more integer parameters and return values to Java boolean, that were missed while working on #181.
  • Xlib's Bool
  • OpenCL's cl_bool
  • DynCall's DCbool
• Moved JNI global reference functions from MemoryUtil to the generated org.lwjgl.system.jni.JNINativeInterface.
• The Vulkan capabilities have been split into two classes: VKCapabilitiesInstance and VKCapabilitiesDevice.
  • Flags for core Vulkan versions exist in both classes.
  • Flags for instance extensions exist only in VKCapabilitiesInstance.
  • Flags for device extensions exist only in VKCapabilitiesDevice.
  • Functions that dispatch on VkInstance or VkPhysicalDevice exist only in VKCapabilitiesInstance.
  • Functions that dispatch on VkDevice and device-derived handles exist only in VKCapabilitiesDevice.
  • Bootstrapping functions can be retrieved with VK.getFunctionProvider().

SDL 2.0.6 has been released.  SDL, the Simple Directmedia Layer, is a low level C framework providing cross platform low level services for 2D game developers.  SDL has been used for such titles as FTL:Faster than Light, Axiom Verge and Starbound and hundreds of other titles.  It provides access to graphics, gamepad, windowing and more.  It is completely free and open source.  The 2.0.6 release contains several bug fixes as well as new cross platform Vulkan support.

Details of this release:

General:

• Added cross-platform Vulkan graphics support in SDL_vulkan.h
  SDL_Vulkan_LoadLibrary()
  SDL_Vulkan_GetVkGetInstanceProcAddr()
  SDL_Vulkan_GetInstanceExtensions()
  SDL_Vulkan_CreateSurface()
  SDL_Vulkan_GetDrawableSize()
  SDL_Vulkan_UnloadLibrary()
  This is all the platform-specific code you need to bring up Vulkan on all SDL platforms. You can look at an example in test/testvulkan.c
• Added SDL_ComposeCustomBlendMode() to create custom blend modes for 2D rendering
• Added SDL_HasNEON() which returns whether the CPU has NEON instruction support
• Added support for many game controllers, including the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller
• Added support for inverted axes and separate axis directions in game controller mappings
• Added functions to return information about a joystick before it’s opened:
  SDL_JoystickGetDeviceVendor()
  SDL_JoystickGetDeviceProduct()
  SDL_JoystickGetDeviceProductVersion()
  SDL_JoystickGetDeviceType()
  SDL_JoystickGetDeviceInstanceID()
• Added functions to return information about an open joystick:
  SDL_JoystickGetVendor()
  SDL_JoystickGetProduct()
  SDL_JoystickGetProductVersion()
  SDL_JoystickGetType()
  SDL_JoystickGetAxisInitialState()
• Added functions to return information about an open game controller:
  SDL_GameControllerGetVendor()
  SDL_GameControllerGetProduct()
  SDL_GameControllerGetProductVersion()
• Added SDL_GameControllerNumMappings() and SDL_GameControllerMappingForIndex() to be able to enumerate the built-in game controller mappings
• Added SDL_LoadFile() and SDL_LoadFile_RW() to load a file into memory
• Added SDL_DuplicateSurface() to make a copy of a surface
• Added an experimental JACK audio driver
• Implemented non-power-of-two audio resampling, optionally using libsamplerate to perform the resampling
• Added the hint SDL_HINT_AUDIO_RESAMPLING_MODE to control the quality of resampling
• Added the hint SDL_HINT_RENDER_LOGICAL_SIZE_MODE to control the scaling policy for SDL_RenderSetLogicalSize():
  “0” or “letterbox” - Uses letterbox/sidebars to fit the entire rendering on screen (the default)
  “1” or “overscan” - Will zoom the rendering so it fills the entire screen, allowing edges to be drawn offscreen
• Added the hints SDL_HINT_MOUSE_NORMAL_SPEED_SCALE and SDL_HINT_MOUSE_RELATIVE_SPEED_SCALE to scale the mouse speed when being read from raw mouse input
• Added the hint SDL_HINT_TOUCH_MOUSE_EVENTS to control whether SDL will synthesize mouse events from touch events

Windows:

• The new default audio driver on Windows is WASAPI and supports hot-plugging devices and changing the default audio device
• The old XAudio2 audio driver is deprecated and will be removed in the next release
• Added hints SDL_HINT_WINDOWS_INTRESOURCE_ICON and SDL_HINT_WINDOWS_INTRESOURCE_ICON_SMALL to specify a custom icon resource ID for SDL windows
• The hint SDL_HINT_WINDOWS_DISABLE_THREAD_NAMING is now on by default for compatibility with .NET languages and various Windows debuggers
• Updated the GUID format for game controller mappings, older mappings will be automatically converted on load
• Implemented the SDL_WINDOW_ALWAYS_ON_TOP flag on Windows

Linux:

• Added an experimental KMS/DRM video driver for embedded development

Aseprite, a pixel based drawing and animation app, just released version 1.2.  New features include pixel aspect ratios, gradients, reference layers and more.  There were also several bug fixes and improvements.

From the release blog post:

Aseprite v1.2 is finally the new stable version (*). If you were already using the beta version, you will not notice substantial changes. But if you were using Aseprite v1.1.13, there are a lot of new features for you (like pixel aspect ratio, layer groups, overlapping frame tags, gradients, reference layers, etc.)

This is a list of the changes from v1.2-beta12 to the final v1.2:

• Added new Addition, Subtract, Divide blending modes
• Added support to change theme and UI scaling without restarting (#471)
• Disable transformation handles in the selection when a Shift or Shift+Alt are pressed by default (reported here)
• Fixed high CPU usage on Timeline when we copy layers/frames/cels (bug report)
• Fixed snap to grid bug with selection tool
• Fixed crash closing all files & opening a new one when preview window was playing an animation
• Windows: New x64 version (included in the installer and on Steam, it’ll install the x64 version on x64 machines)
• Windows: New --disable-wintab option to avoid loading wintab32.dll
• Removed Windows XP support (Please contact us in case that you still need a previous version with Windows XP support.)
• macOS: Use the native macOS menu bar (#135)
• macOS: Now ⌘M and ⌘H will Minimize and Hide the window respectively. Use Ctrl+M for Color Curves, and Ctrl+H to change View > Show Extras options.
• macOS: Fixed bug setting broken mouse cursors in some special cases
• macOS: Retina support (#903)
• Fixed other bugs (including #1569, and #1423 thanks to @cebolan)

Several new features were delayed just to create a more stable v1.2 version. So sorry for everybody that don’t get what they asked for :’( Soon I’ll release the first v1.3-beta1 with some crazy new stuff, so stay tuned.

We took a look at Aseprite in action in this video should you wish to learn more.

The popular open source painting package Krita just released version 3.3.0.  Windows users can rejoice at this release for a couple of reasons, especially Surface users.  This release gets support for n-trig pens meaning surfaces and similar laptop pens will not be supported natively.  Additionally the option was added to support Angle instead of OpenGL, which should work around some driver problems.  The release contains several other improvements and features.

Details from the release announcement:

Less than a month after Krita 3.2.1, we’re releasing Krita 3.3.0. We’re bumping the version because there are some important changes, especially for Windows users in this version!

Alvin Wong has implemented support for the Windows 8 event API, which means that Krita now supports the n-trig pen in the Surface line of laptops (and similar laptops from Dell, HP and Acer) natively. This is still very new, so you have to enable this in the tablet settings.

And he also refactored Krita’s hardware-accelerated display functionality to optionally use Angle on Windows instead of native OpenGL. That means that many problems with Intel display chips and broken driver versions are worked around because Krita now can use Direct3D indirectly.

There are more changes in this release, of course:

• Some visual glitches when using hi-dpi screens are fixed (remember: on Windows and Linux, you need to enable this in the settings dialog).
• If you create a new image from clipboard, the image will have a title
• Favorite blending modes and favorite brush presets are now loaded correctly on startup
• GMIC
  • the plugin has been updated to the latest version for Windows and Linux.
  • the configuration for setting the path to the plugin has been removed. Krita looks for the plugin in the folder where the krita executable is, and optionally inside a folder with a name that starts with ‘gmic’ next to the krita executable.
  • there are several fixes for handling layers and communication between Krita and the plugin
• Some websites save jpeg images with a .png extension: that used to confuse Krita, but Krita now first looks inside the file to see what kind of file it really is.
• PNG:
  • 16 and 32 bit floating point images are now converted to 16 bit integer when saving the images as PNG.
  • It’s now possible to save the alpha channel to PNG images even if there are no (semi-) transparent pixels in the image
• When hardware accelerated display is disabled, the color picker mode of the brush tool showed a broken cursor; this has been fixed.
• The Reference Images docker now only starts loading images when it is visible, instead on Krita startup. Note: the reference images docker uses Qt’s imageio plugins to load images. If you are running on Linux, remove all Deepin desktop components. Deepin comes with severely broken qimageio plugins that will crash any Qt application that tries to display images.
• File layers now correctly reload on change again
• Add several new commandline options:
  • –nosplash to start Krita without showing the splash screen
  • –canvasonly to start Krita in canvas-only mode
  • –fullscreen to start Krita full-screen
  • –workspace Workspace to start Krita with the given workspace
• Selections
  • The Select All action now first clears the selection before selecting the entire image
  • It is now possible to extend selections outside the canvas boundary
• Performance improvements: in several places superfluous reads from the settings were eliminated, which makes generating a layer thumbnail faster and improves painting if display acceleration is turned off.
• The smart number input boxes now use the current locale to follow desktop settings for numbers
• The system information dialog for bug reports is improved
• macOS/OSX specific changes:
  • Bernhard Liebl has improved the tablet/stylus accuracy. The problem with circles having straight line segments is much improved, though it’s not perfect yet.
  • On macOS/OSX systems with and AMD gpu, support for hardware accelerated display is disabled because saving to PNG and JPG hangs Krita otherwise.

Krita is completely free and available for download here.

Augmented Reality (AR) seems to be the new hotness in game development, enabling applications to mix the real world and their game worlds together.  PlayCanvas, a 3D HTML5 powered game engine we reviewed here as well as a more recent tutorial series here, just added AR support.  Built over top of the ARToolkit, PlayCanvasAR is described as:

PlayCanvasAR makes it easy to build lightning fast augmented reality applications. With it, you can construct web-based AR applications with zero programming using the PlayCanvas Editor. Just drag in your 3D models and watch them appear in AR!

With the following features:

• Amazing Performance - PlayCanvasAR delivers 60 frames per second, even on mobile.
• Marker-based Tracking - PlayCanvasAR utilizes the amazing ARToolkit, an open source marker-based tracking library. Originally coded in C++, it has been ported to JavaScript using Emscripten.
• Incredible Visuals - PlayCanvas provides an advanced WebGL graphics engine. It supports the latest WebGL 2 graphics API and implements Physically Based Rendering to achieve incredible visuals for your AR applications. And yes, that's open sourced too.

The following browsers are currently supported:

• Android 4.0+ (Chrome 21+)
• iOS 11+ (Safari 11+, Chrome 21+, Firefox 17+)
• Windows XP+ (Chrome 21+, Firefox 17+, Opera 18+, Edge 12+)
• macOS (Safari 11+, Chrome 21+, Firefox 17+, Opera 18+)
• Linux (Chrome 21+, Firefox 17+, Opera 18+)

PlayCanvasAr is available here.  You can see the new AR functionality in action in the video below:

There is a new release of the Lua powered 2D Defold game engine, bringing the version to 1.2.114.  If you’ve never heard of the Defold game engine we have a complete tutorial series to get you started, available here.  This new releases adds support for Facebook’s new GameRoom App Store for Windows platforms only. 

Details of the release from the release notes:

Engine

• DEF-2505- Added: Facebook Gameroom integration
• DEF-2896 - Fixed: Added more allowed libs when building android (native extensions)

Work In Progress

Native Extensions + Linux

When updating the build server to Ubuntu 16.04, we’re also migrating our own
CI pipeline to use the same Docker container. We’re doing this to minimize the configuration overhead.

While doing this, we need to update a lot of smaller things in our pipeline, and also we’re cleaning up
old technical debt. But, we’re seeing light at the end of of the tunnel now, and we can hopefully release this feature
to you soon.

Lazy loading of factory assets

We’re also reworking how the assets are loaded in the game.
Instead of loading all assets up front, we’re now loading the assets right before they’re needed.
This feature should help out the developers that have many and/or large

Frame throttling

We’re also making sure the engine respects the “update_frequency” setting while still using VSync.
This will remove the issue of having the game run too fast.

Cocos2d-x, the popular C++ port of the Cocos2D game framework, just released version 3.16.  This release brings better support for Cocos Creator, which you can see in action in this video.  The release also includes several fixed and minor new features as well as the discontinuation of support for two platforms, Tizen and Windows 10 Metro.  If you are interested in learning more about Cocos2d-x be sure to check out our tutorial series available here.

Highlights of 3.16 release:

• better support creator_to_cocos2dx Creator plugin
• add LayerRadiaGradientLayer
• update to support Android Studio 2.3.3
• fix the issue that lua projects will crash on iOS simulator with Xcode 8.0+
• revert functionality of CocosStudio reader and flatbuffer
• fix compling errors with iOS 11
• use prebuit bullet libraries to improve compiling speed
• remove supporting of Windows 10 metro, Windows Phones and Tizen
• update to Spine v3.5.35 and support skeleton batching in web engine

You can learn more about this release here.  Cocos2d-x is free and open source, more details available here.

At the annual Oculus Connect developer conference, there have been several announcements on the VR front.  First is a pretty massive price cut to the existing Oculus Rift bundle, the second such price cut, driving the price down to $399 USD.

Summer of Rift had a major impact on the VR industry, and the community’s response showed that the appetite for best-in-class VR hardware and games is stronger than ever. We want to continue getting VR into more people’s hands, so we’re permanently lowering the price of Rift to $399 USD.

Each Rift bundle comes with Touch controllers, sensors, and six free apps that give you hours of entertainment including Epic’s arcade shooter, Robo Recall, and our creative tools, Medium and Quill.

Read more about the price cut here.

In addition to the price cuts, they also announced an all new Oculus device, the Oculus Go.  It is binary compatible with the Gear VR.  Essentially it seems to be a GearVR without the phone requirement and built in speakers.  Available for $199USD, it also comes with a controller and will certainly make VR more accessible to a wider audience.

Our first standalone product is Oculus Go—the easiest way to jump into VR. It ships early next year, starting at $199 USD. It’s awesome for watching movies or concerts, playing games, or just hanging out with your friends in VR.

This all-in-one device makes VR more accessible than ever and represents a huge leap forward in comfort, visual clarity, and ease-of-use.

The headset is super lightweight, and the new fabric used for the facial interface is soft and breathable.

The high-resolution fast-switch LCD screen dramatically improves visual clarity and reduces screen door effect. And the next-generation lenses are our best ever—offering a wide field of view with significantly reduced glare.

Oculus Go also ships with integrated spatial audio. The speakers are built right into the headset, transporting you straight into VR and making the headset easy to share with someone else. If you need it, there’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack for private listening.

Gear VR and Oculus Go apps are binary compatible, and they share the same controller input set—that means developers building for Gear VR are already building for Oculus Go. As an added plus, the best of our mobile VR content library will be available to everyone on day one.

Oculus Go pushes the envelope of what’s possible at such an accessible price point, and we can’t wait to share more early next year.

Read more about the new device here.

They also announced the open sourcing of the Rift DK2.

Today, we’re excited to announce the open source release of Rift Development Kit 2 (DK2). Our progress since the release of DK1 has been thanks in no small part to this community working tirelessly alongside us. We’re doing this both to preserve and share what we learned about VR in the early days, and to let anyone use the design in their own projects.

The open source release of the DK2 hardware follows on from our earlier releases of Rift DK1 and Latency Tester. This includes schematics, board layout, mechanical CAD, artwork, and specifications under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, and firmware under BSD+PATENT licences. We present a guided tour of DK2 for those interested in digging in deeper.

All told, a pretty big day for VR.  I’ve long held that the future of VR is a standalone device, untethered from a computer.  Hopefully the new Oculus Go solves many of the GearVR’s thermal issues and has a serviceable battery life.  VR is a great experience, but when its limited to 15 minute intervals, it kind of loses something!

Version 2017.2 of the Unity game engine was released today.  2D game tools received a lot of love in this release with new tiled based world building tools.  Unity also teamed up with Autodesk to improve FBX format support from 3DS Max and Maya.  VR platforms also got some love with ARCore, ARKit, Vuforia and Windows Mixed Reality support all added.

Further details from the Unity blog:

• tilemap support for grid based 2D titles
• Cinemachine support in 2D
• sprite packing speed improvements and cleaner box collider
• timeline visualization of audio clips
• interactive tutorials ( previously discussed here )
• NavMesh visualization
• improved FBX importer/exporter directly using Autodesk’s FBX SDK
• support for embedded materials in FBX files
• exporting of animated custom properties from DCCs
• importing support for Stingray PBS shaders
• new AssetBundle API
• support for XR platform Vuforia
• support for Microsoft’s Mixed Reality platform
• OpenVR support on MacOS
• Google ARCore support ( via plugin )
• Apple ARKit support ( via plugin )
• Stereo Instancing ( single pass instanced rendering )
• Editor simulation of Vive headsets
• low level rendering support for the Nintendo Switch
• Retina support for the MacOS player
• GI profiler ( Global Illumination )
• improved Progressive Lightmapper
• linear rendering in WebGL ( details here )
• particle system improvements
• remoting settings, remotely change game settings without creating a new binary

You can read complete details in the release notes.

The Defold game engine received another update, this one bringing it to verison 1.2.115.  New to this release is the ability to dynamically load/unload any factory resource.  The engine also gained the ability to toggle vsync on and off.  If you are an Ubuntu user, be aware that the minimum version has been bumped to 16.04.  If you are interested in learning more about the Defold engine, we have a complete tutorial series available here.

Further details of this release:

Engine

• DEF-2760 - Added: Dynamic loading/unloading of collectionfactory and factory resources
• DEF-1101 - Added: Ray cast response on miss
• DEF-1785 - Added: Software vsync
• DEF-2913 - Added: Updated PVRTexLib to version 4.18
• DEF-1284 - Added: Updated LuaJIT to version 2.0.5
• DEF-2902 - Fixed: Improve handling of erroneous mesh input data
• DEF-2915 - Fixed: “ERROR:RESOURCE: Empty resource path” is spammed in console
• DEF-2907 - Fixed: Spine draw order out of bounds
• DEF-2891 - Fixed: Fixing invalid MathUtil::decompose and quaternionFromMatrix.

Documentation

Documentation is going through a slow metamorphosis from larva (Editor 1) via pupa (currently) to butterfly (Editor 2).

• New resource management manual. https://www.defold.com/manuals/resource/10
• Updated manuals on factories and collection factories. https://www.defold.com/manuals/factory/6 and https://www.defold.com/manuals/collection-factory/5
• New installation manual. https://www.defold.com/manuals/install/3
• New editor overview. https://www.defold.com/manuals/editor/4

Work in progress

Native Extensions + Linux

The upgrade of our CI machines was a big step towards supporting Linux as a platform in Native Extensions.

We’ve also decided to remove the 32 bit OSX + Linux support for the engine itself. This will remove two very old platforms for us; 32 bit OSX is obsolete, and Editor 2 only supports 64 bit Linux.

The Allegro framework just released version 5.2.3.  Allegro is a C based media/game framework, very similar in scope to SDL or SFML.  Allegro holds a special place in my heart as it was one of the first open source game libraries I ever encountered and it was one of the most accessible C/C++ libraries I had encountered.  To get an idea of how long Allegro has been around, the original meaning was Atari Low LEvel Game ROutines.  Yes, Atari, but not the VCS, Allegro started life on the 16bit Atari ST in the 90s.  Now it is an open source and team effort available here.

Details of the 5.2.3 release:

Changes from 5.2.2 to 5.2.3 (October 2017)

The main developers this time were: Elias Pschernig, SiegeLord, Sebastian Krzyszkowiak, Vitaliy V. Tokarev, Simon Naarmann, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro, Trent Gamblin).

Core:

• Add al_path_ustr (Bruce Pascoe).

• Handle NULL sections more gracefully with the config API.

• Add missing glStencilMaskSeparate prototype (Aaron Bolyard).

• Add al_clear_keyboard_state.

• Don't add blank lines before config sections when writing them out.

• Fix fs_stdio_read_directory appending an extra slash.

• Fix al_set_window_constraints when the flag ALLEGRO_MAXIMIZED is set.

• Fix al_set_clipping_rectangle when out-of-bounds (Bruce Pascoe).

• Enable blocked locking of S3TC formats unconditionally.

Raspberry Pi port:

• Set default file interface when attempting to read /boot/config.txt.

Android port:

• Replace the old build system that used deprecated tools with a new Gradle-based system.

• Work around crashes on some Androids when an FBO is bound during egl_SwapBuffers.

• Fix LocalRef leak when opening files using APK interface.

• Remove -Wno-psabi switches from Toolchain-android.cmake.

Linux port:

• Make three finger salute and LED toggle configurable.

• Fix KEY_CHAR events under X11 with compose key enabled.

• Fix clearing the ALLEGRO_MAXIMIZED flag under X11.

• Add al_x_set_initial_icon.

• Free wm_hints in set_initial_icon.

• Read Allegro system config from ~/.allegro5rc on Unix.

Windows port:

• Make bitmap contents persist again after device loss.

• Add large file support for MSVC.

• Only test cooperative lavel if device is known to be lost.

• Don't leak the D3DEffect when attaching multiple sources.

• Fix al_get_monitor_info (Tobias Scheuer).

OSX port:

• Various fixes for OSX 10.6.

• Fix some Bluetooth mice on OS X (Tom Bass).

• Fixed deprecation warning when starting OSX console app (Tom Bass).

• Fix OSX magic main with the LTO switch (Evert Glebbeek).

Audio addon:

• Allow setting the buffer size for ALSA.

• Don't apply gain twice for sample instances and streams when pan is not ALLEGRO_PAN_NONE.

• Disallow attaching mixers with different channel configurations.

• Add al_set_sample_instance_channel_matrix and al_set_audio_stream_channel_matrix.

• Don't free the extra pointer in DirectSound if voice fails to play for some reason.

• Add al_lock_sample_id and al_unlock_sample_id.

• For OpenAL, detach from buffers before deleting.

• Return true when seeking mod audio streams.

Acodec addon:

• Free audio stream buffer in flac_stream_close.

• Add DUMB 2.0 support.

Color addon:

• Add XYZ, xyY, Lab and LCH color spaces.

• Remove "purwablue" named color, add "rebeccablue".

Native dialog addon:

• Improve save dialogs under GTK driver.

• Improved path behavior in GTK native file dialog ([bk]door.maus).

• Enable ALLEGRO_FILECHOOSER_FOLDER On Linux (Todd Cope).

• Use unique ids to identify menu items internally, fixing their event sources.

• Make the native message box return 2 on Windows when cancel is pressed.

Image addon:

• Set compression level to Z_DEFAULT_COMPRESSION in png saver by default.

• Make PNG, JPEG compression level configurable.

• Make PNG gamma value configurable.

• Add WebP support with libwebp.

Video addon:

• Allow calling al_init_video_addon after al_shutdown_video_addon was called.

Build system:

• Detect and link optional FreeType dependencies.

• Add a CMake option to prefer static dependencies.

• Fix SDL platform build.

Python binding:

• Fix some corrupted regexps in the generation script (verderten).

Documentation:

• Lots of improvements as usual (Edgar Reynaldo, Mark Oates, twobit).

Examples:

• Fix various issues with ex_curl.

• Fix memory leak in ex_audio_simple (Rm Beer).

There is a new release of the free Cocos2d-x powered Cocos Creator game engine.  If you are interested in learning more about Cocos Creator, be sure to check out our hands-on video available here or embedded below.

Details of the release from the release announcement.

Major Highlights

• Building for Web platform, the md5 embedded in file name feature now supports all script files
• Added option for integrating AnySDK library for either AppStore or jailbreak channel
• Fixed a lot of native memory leaks
• Enhance browser compatibility on the Web platform

Specific Details

Editor

• [Build] When building the Web platform, if you enable md5Cache, all the resources and script file name will have md5 info embedded.
• [Build] When compiling jsc for native platform, keeps line number in jsc for debugging. Also added js file backup for debug version.
• [Build] Fix problems with Android Studio debugging failure.
• [Build] Added option for integrating AnySDK library for either AppStore or jailbreak channel
• [Build] Fixed on Windows md5Cache option not working when project folder and Creator program is not in the same disk partition.
• [TypeScript] Fixed 1.6.1 Warning when creating a TypeScript script
• [TypeScript] Fixed errors that occurs when defining Class’s getter in TypeScript
• [Properties] Fixed script preview error “can not set property ‘innerHTML’ of null”
• [Properties] improves the fault handling when the attribute type is failed to find
• [Preview] Fixed stuck issue when eruda is enabled and printing log.

Engine

• [JSB] Fixed Spidermonkey v52 frequent switching scenes will not take the initiative GC problem
• [JSB] support the use of Firefox remote debugger for JSB debugging.
• [JSB] Fixed scheduleOnce causing memory leak problem
• [JSB] Fixed Cocos2dxActivity is re-created which causes crash if launching app first time and re-opening from icon
• [Engine] Fixed WebSocket may crash when there’s no js delegate issue.
• [Engine] Fixed JS_EncodeStringToUTF8 may cause problems with memory leaks
• [Engine] Fixed cc.game.restart can not destroy the persistRootNodes problem.
• [Engine] Fixed Android QQ misjudge cc.sys.browserType issue.
• [Engine] Fixed Android Opera misjudge cc.sys.browserType issue.
• [Engine] Fixed the nodes under the Mask may cause click detection failed when works together with Camera.
• [Engine] Fixed bug that Texture2D.url can not be fetched on native platform
• [Engine] [iOS] Default audio session mode should be set to AVAudioSessionCategoryAmbient
• [Engine] Adjust the execution order of requestAnimationFrame to mainLoop before avoiding the operation of setFrameRate -> cancelAnimationFrame.
• [Action] Fix nested sequence with repeat being considered as reversed issue
• [iOS] Fixed an issue where the iOS resolution was incorrect due to the launch image setting error
• [Audio] Fixing a user to log off an event can affect the issue of internal event monitoring.

Components

• [Camera] Fix bug that affects the coordinates in global event parameters
• [RichText] Add the handleTouchEvent property to cancel this property to avoid the RichText blocking event
• [RichText] After the event is being monitored, the event is no longer distributed to the parent node
• [RichText] Fixed bug with RichText size of 0
• [EditBox] Fixed EditBox placeHolder text Color setting may not take effect on native platform issue.
• [EditBox] Fixed EditorBox Enter after responding 2 times editBoxEditingReturn event (Windows platform)
• [EditBox] Fixed FireFox browser The EditorBox type is Number that can not get the focus
• [WebView] Fixed Webview loaded web page after playing music, switching the scene will continue to play the problem
• [Layout] Fix Layout conflicts with Widget, resulting in an unlimited increase in Layout size
• [Widget] repair RichText by Widget role may cause the editor to report the problem
• [Mask] Fixes the problem that the mask rectangle type position does not match the display
• [ScrollView] Added the scroll began and scroll ended events
• [DragonBones] Fix DragonBones objects in native platform memory does not release the problem
• [Tiledmap] Fix tilemap culling incorrectly

RayLib is a free C library ideally suited towards beginners.  They just released version 1.8 adding procedural image generation, 3D geometric primitives, PBR material support and more.  If you are interested in learning more about RayLib be sure to check out our earlier hands-on look available here.

Details of the release from /r/gamedev:

• Procedural image generation functions, a set of new functions have been added to generate gradients, checked, noise and cellular images from scratch. Image generation could be useful for certain textures or learning pourpouses.

• Parametric mesh generation functions, create 3d meshes from scratch just defining a set of parameters, meshes like cube, sphere, cylinder, torus, knot and more can be very useful for prototyping or for lighting and texture testing.

• PBR Materials support, a completely redesigned shaders and material system allows advance materials definition and usage, with fully customizable shaders. Some new functions have been added to generate the environment textures required for PBR shading and a new complete PBR material example is also provided for reference.

• Custom Android APK build pipeline with simple Makefile. Actually, full code building mechanism based on plain Makefile has been completely reviewed and Android building has been added for sources and also for templates building into final APK package. This way, raylib Android building has been greatly simplified and integrated seamlessly into standard build scripts.

• rlgl module has been completely reviewed and most of the functions renamed for consistency. This way, standalone usage of rlgl is promoted, with a complete example provided. rlgl offers a pseudo-OpenGL 1.1 immediate-mode programming-style layer, with backends to multiple OpenGL versions.

• raymath library has been also reviewed to align with other advance math libraries like GLM. Matrix math has been improved and simplified, some new Quaternion functions have been added and Vector3 functions have been renamed all around the library for consistency with new Vector2 functionality.

• As always, examples and templates have been reviewed to work with new version (some new examples have been added), all external libraries have been updated to latest stable version and latest Notepad++ and MinGW have been configured to work with new raylib v1.8.

The complete change log is available here.  To learn more or to download RayLib click here.

LibGDX have just released version 1.9.7.  LibGDX is a popular open source Java based game framework, although releases have been somewhat infrequent of late.  We have extensively covered it in the past with text and video tutorials available here and here if you are interested in learning more.  This release includes several compatibility upgrades including iOS 11 support, RoboVM 2.3.3 support, a bump up to LWJGL 3.1.3 and several improvements and features.  Be aware that in order to support LWJGL code breaking changes were made to the GLFrameBuffer class.

Details from the release notes:

- Update to MobiVM(RoboVM) 2.3.3

- Add iOS 11 support

- Update to Lwjgl 3.1.3

- Update to MOE 1.4.0

- API Change: GLFrameBuffer has been refactored https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/pull/4882. Create standard FrameBuffers with static methods. Customized FBOS with FrameBufferBuilder

- API addition: Tiled group layer support

- Fix Tiled properties, offset parsing for image layers

- API addition: Added utility methods for Vector equals with epsilon

- Fix Animation backing array type

- Fix Mesh copying with 0 indices

- Fix restoration of pooled particle effects scale

- Fix loss of controller listeners on reconnect

- Added basic kotlin project generation support in the setup tool

- API addition: Allow APK expansion to be used in fragments and activities

- API addition: Added color properties support from tiled maps

- API Change: Added rotation vector sensor support on Android

- API Change: GLProfiler refactored for OOP and lwjgl3 multi windows

- LWJGL3: The creation of additional windows via Lwjgl3Application.newWindow() is now deferred, with postRunnable(), until all existing windows have been updated. This fixes a potential native crash with NVidia GL drivers on Windows, presumably caused by a GL context conflict.

- API addition: Lwjgl3WindowListener.created() is called after a new window has been created. It's unsafe to call Lwjgl3Window functions in between Lwjgl3Application.newWindow() and this callback.

- Updated LWJGL3 backend to 3.1.3.

- Lwjgl3Graphics.setUndecorated() and Lwjgl3Graphics.setResizable() now delegate their work to the respective GLFW functions.

- API addition: ProgressBar.isVertical() - returns whether a progress bar is vertical or horizontal.

- API Change: SplitPane now by default does not allow the split amount to shrink children below their minimum sizes (cropping them). This behavior can be reverted by overriding clampSplitAmount or wrapping the children in Containers set to minSize(0) and fill(). SplitPane also now correctly includes the handle min size in its own min size calculations.

- API Change: SplitPane.getSplit() renamed to SplitPane.getSplitAmount() to match other getter and setter names.

- Improved internal Timer synchronization.

- API Change: List#drawItem, added float width parameter.

- API Addition: Make it possible to disable sound on the GWT-Backend with disableSound=true.

- API Change: ScrollPane setWidget deprecated in favor of setActor to match other APIs.

- API Change: removed JGLFW backend

- Fixed mixed up use of TexturePacker.Settings.stripWhitespaceX|Y.

- Added joystick POV support to LWJGL3 controller backend.

- Added support for 2d particles sprite animation.

- API Change: ParticleEmitter getSprite, setSprite, getImagePath, setImagePath are now getSprites, setSprites, getImagePaths, setImagePaths.

- Added support for 2d particles independant scale X and Y.

- API Change: ParticleEmitter getScale, matchSize are now getScaleX/getScaleY, matchSizeX/matchSizeY. Added scaleSize(float scaleX, float scaleY)