The open source Duality game engine just received a 3.0 release.  The duality engine, that we featured previously in the Closer Look series is a complete 2D game engine built on top of a C# framework that also includes a comprehensive game editor, a modern component based design, as well as good documentation and a decent sized community.  The only real flaw I can think of is that it is currently Windows only, so that limits the audience to a certain degree.  The 3.0 release is loaded with features, the largest of which is due to the complete rewrite of the rendering pipeline and underlying design, which resulted in a more modern shader based approach and up to a doubling of per frame performance.

Highlights

Rewrote the entire rendering pipeline, allowing massive improvements in efficiency, ease of use and feature coverage while at the same time shifting towards more modern, shader-focused rendering techniques.

• RenderSetup resources allow replacing how Duality renders a frame, providing a simple entry point for pre- or post processing steps, as well as completely customized rendering behavior.
• Self-contained scenes allow using Scene resources as isolated simulation spaces independently of the active main scene.
• Focus on performance and a more data-oriented design of both rendering and update cycles. A worst-case rendering benchmark comparing v2 and v3 performance went down from 13 ms to 6 ms per frame, as well as 2000+ (gen0 to gen2) GC collections per minute to about 5 (gen0) collections.
• Refactored core API, replacing many “first iteration” designs with more streamlined ones. The most prominent example might be the deprecation of manual context checks in ICmpInitializable in favor of a simple OnActivate / OnDeactivate method pair, but many similar improvements were done as well.

Be sure to check out the full change log, as the above summary only scratches the surface of what’s new in this release.  As mentioned earlier, the Duality game engine is open source and available on Github.  If you want to see a quick hands-on introduction to Duality, be sure to watch the video embedded below.

The book Game Engine Black Book Doom was just released by Fabien Sanglard just in time for the 25th anniversary of the release of Doom.  The book, with forwards by John Carmack and Dave Taylor, is an in-depth look at the details and techniques that went in to creating the classic game Doom.  In addition to dissecting the code in the idTech game engine, the book looks at the hardware and software of the day as well as a details of porting to a variety of different consoles.

Details from the author’s homepage:

From November 2017 to November 2018, it took one year to complete. Both John Carmack and Dave Taylor kindly wrote forewords. The result is 427 pages, full color, to describe in great detail the PCs of the era (Intel 80486, VESA Local BUS, Dos Extenders, Watcom Compiler, ...), the NeXT hardware (and especially the NeXTStation TurboColor), the engine, and the console ports to the Jaguar, Sega 32X, Super Nintendo, Sony Playstation, 3DO, and Sega Saturn.

I wish the paper version could have been priced lower. A black and white version would have been cheaper ($39.00) but given the many screenshots and drawings, readability would have suffered. I tried to look around but all printers gave me roughly the same price for a 400+ pages full color book. If anybody has an idea to lower the price I will listen carefully.

The book is available in print form on Amazon, as well as on Google in DRM free e-book form.

There is a new Humble Bundle that could be of interest to developers looking for audio and video editing software.  The center piece of the bundle is certainly MAGIX VEGAS Pro 15, a high end video editing package.  While this is one release behind the most current version, it also entitles you to improved upgrade pricing to the most current version should you desire.  VEGAS is not the only item in this bundle however, there is also an audio editor called AUDIO STUDIO, as well as an easier to learn (but compatible with VEGAS) video editor called Movie Studio 15.  Rounding out the bundle are Fastcut, Vegas DVD Architect and HitFilm Movie Essentials.

If you are interested in seeing what you get with this bundle be sure to check the following video that goes hands-on with main software in this bundle and helps you determine if this bundle is right for you.  If you are looking to get into video editing, this is an excellent opportunity while also supporting this channel and charity at the same time.

A bit of a warning during each installation, you will have the option to install other programs during installation such as MAGIX Connect and Music Maker.  Neither are required and both would be considered bloatware by most.  Additionally a valid registered email with Magix is also a requirement to activate your applications.  Additionally you can get a 30 day trial of almost every application in this bundle here.

Fresh on the heels of releasing their new online store leverage the technologies they developed creating Fortnite, Epic Games have announced plans for a cross-platform online multiplayer game service, that is game engine agnostic and completely free for developers!  Rolling out in stages, it will start life as a C SDK, with Unreal and Unity (yes, that Unity) game engine implementations starting with cloud saves and online storage and adding new features such as logins, achievements, friends lists, voice communications and more as time goes on.

Details of the roll out strategy from the Unreal blog:

The service launch will begin with a C SDK encapsulating our online services, together with Unreal Engine and Unity integrations. We’ll start with a core set of features and expand over time. Specifically:

• Cross-Platform Login, Friends, Presence, Profile, and Entitlements (coming Q2-Q3 2019 to PC, other platforms throughout 2019): Provides the core functionality for persistently recognizing players across multiple sessions and devices; identifying friends; and managing free and paid item entitlements. This will support all 7 major platforms (PC, Mac, iOS, Android, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch) to the full extent each platform allows per-title.
• PC/Mac Overlay API (coming Q3 2019): Provides a user interface for login, friends, and other features in a game-agnostic, engine-agnostic way.
• Cross-Platform Voice Comms (coming Q3 2019 to all platforms): Epic is building a new in-game voice communications service supporting all platforms, all stores, and all engines, which will be available for free. (For developers needing an immediately-available voice solution, check out Discord, Vivox, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble.)
• Cross-Platform Parties and Matchmaking (coming Q3-4 2019 to all platforms)
• Cross-Platform Data Storage, Cloud-Saved Games (coming Q2 2019)
• Cross-Platform Achievements and Trophies (coming Q3 2019)

The services described above are just our first steps. As you can see from our game and engine efforts, we’re also working on further support for user-generated content, enhanced social features, anti-cheat, and more.

Simply put, there has to be a catch here, but I cannot determine exactly what it is.  This could potentially be a massive opportunity for game developers looking to support multiplayer in their game and a huge shot across the bow for technology providers that make their living providing such services now for a fee!

Following a beta release in September, Unity have just released the full version of Unity 2018.3.  The marquee feature of Unity 2018.3 is the new ability to nest prefabs inside other prefabs which will give game developers massive flexibility in how they structure and organize their games and is a feature developers have been asking for since Unity was first released!  Unity 2018.3 also contains major new features to the terrain system which we showcased in this earlier video.  A new GPU powered particle system called Visual Effect Graph is also available in preview format, along with a new isometric tilemap support, HDRP & LWRP improvements, a new Visual Studio Code debugger plugin, improved package manager and settings windows plus much more.

Details of the release from the Unity blog:

Over the years, one of the features we’ve heard you requesting most often has been the ability to nest Prefabs. After conducting numerous interviews, usability tests and research at game jams, however, we found out that a lot of you also needed several other changes to the Prefab workflows. Therefore, we have been improving the whole system with a focus on reusability, control and user-friendliness.

The new Prefab workflows allow you to split up scenes and Prefabs on a granular level. They give you greater flexibility, increase your productivity and enable you to work confidently without worrying about making time-consuming errors.

Continuing our focus on workflow improvements, Unity 2018.3 now has unified Settings windows for Project Settings and Preferences. The new windows are dockable and searchable, which makes it much more convenient to quickly find and change settings.

The default scripting runtime is now .NET 4.x. The old .NET 3.5 runtime has been deprecated and support for it will soon be dropped. Projects that target the .NET 4.x scripting runtime will be able to use the open-source Roslyn compiler.

In this release, we also added a PhysX 3.4 upgrade that comes with improvements to stability and performance as well as support for multiple worlds and C# Job queries.

The world-building 2D Tilemap tool now enables you to build isometric Tilemaps, which makes it easier to create 2D projects such as strategy, tycoons and simulation games.

Unity 2018.3 also ships with an update to the Terrain system, which marks the beginning of a larger overhaul. In this update, our focus has been not only to set the foundation for further improvements with a few tweaks to the UI and tools but also to improve performance. We also added High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) and Lightweight Render Pipeline (LWRP) support.

Unity 2018.3 includes a number of improvements to the HDRP (preview). This version adds preliminary support for VR and multisample anti-aliasing and improves support for PC, Mac, XBox One and PS4. The UI of various Inspectors of HDRP elements is now updated: Camera, Lights, Reflections Probe, and Material. Finally, we added a new lighting model, so you can author more complex materials.

We are also introducing the GPU Progressive Lightmapper in Preview for Windows and several improvements to lighting.

Our new Visual Effect Graph, which ships in Preview as a package, enables you to create beautiful effects using a node-based system that is both easy to use and flexible. Inspired by leading VFX software tools for films, it empowers artists to create stand-out visual effects for games and other projects with millions of particles running on the GPU.

Unity 2018.3 also includes several new features for the existing Particle System. For example, there are Particle Meshes that can now be flipped just like with billboards, Particle Lights that now support Real-time Global Illumination, and the new Ringbuffer Mode, which makes it easier to create persistent effects like footprints or bullet holes by keeping particles visible after their lifetime expires and until they are replaced.

Mobile improvements include Dynamic Resolution Scaling support for Vulkan and Metal, Android AppBundle generation support and faster APK package build times on Android with APKzlib.

For XR, we added Native Support for Daydream Controllers, Haptics APIs for VR controllers, and updates to the AR Foundation as well as XR Performance Testing.

You can read the complete release notes for more details of what is contained in the 2018.3 release.

The following video takes a hands-on and more in-depth look at Unity 2018.3.

MakeHuman, an open source character creation software that started life as a Blender plugin, recently released 1.2.0 Alpha 2.  With Manuel Bastioni Labs recently shutting down, MakeHuman has become the primary open source character creation software.  Fortunately it is quite good and is getting better with more extensive community support.  While no longer a Blender plugin, MakeHuman still tightly integrates with Blender, both via it’s mhx format and through a real time communication option.

Highlights of the 1.2.0 a2 release include:

• The codebase has received a major overhaul to bring it up to date with modern versions of Python and Qt
• Third party assets can be downloaded from within MakeHuman with a simple point and click procedure
• There is a completely new Blender integration, with support for socket transfers, IK and Kinect
• Improved internationalization support for non-ASCII characters (backported)
• Plugins in user space
• Plugins activation at runtime
• Improved tag sorting capabilities, including sticky tag provisions
• Tags for models (with configurable tag count)
• Show Name Tags instead of file names in the file loader.
• Saving model as target
• Real weight estimation
• Configurable location for the home folder
• MHX2 is bundled in the default installation
• There is a new installer for windows
• There is a new PPA for ubuntu. This PPA also offers builds of plugins.
• Using Jupyter for the shell utility, if available on the system (currently not working for MakeHuman windows builds)

You can download the installer for Windows here while a Linux PPA is available here.  If you want to learn more about MakeHuman, be sure to check out the video embedded below.

Following up on the usual Black Friday sales bonanza, Unity are doing another sale on some of the most popular assets in the Unity Store.  One very cool difference to this sale is you only pay for what you don’t own when purchasing a bundle.   So for example, if you own an item in a bundle, the cost of that item is subtracted from the total and you still get the full savings on all of the remaining items in the bundle.  In a world with so many sales, it’s becoming increasingly common to own an item or two in a sale, making the sale much less valuable on the remaining items, so I appreciate this approach.

The bundles include:

The Best of 2018 Bundle

A collection of the most popular assets from 2018, with no over arching theme other than quality.

Procedural Worlds Bundle

A collection of tools from Procedural Worlds, most well known for Gaia, which you can see in action here.

Heroic Fantasy Pack

A collection of 90 fully rigged and animated fantasy characters.

Polygon Library

A collection of 21 model packs from Synty Studios for a wide variety of different themes.

Each bundle is @ 55% off.  The offer runs until the end of 2018, except the Best of 2018 pack which runs until January 6th.  All of the above links contain an affiliate code and help the channel financially should you decide to make a purchase. 

Amazon have just released beta 1.17 of the Lumberyard game engine, a Amazon developed fork of the seminal CryEngine.  If you are interested in learning more about Lumberyard be sure to check out our previous hands-on video.  This new release contains over 70 improvement, fixes and changes including many quality of life changes, especially in regards to slices (Lumberyard prefabs).

Details of the 1.17 beta from the release notes:

1. Improved Slice Override Visualization– Now when using the entity outliner, you get a quick visual queue where you’ve made your changes. Changes to a slice entity are now highlighted in orange to notify you at a glance that something has been edited and should be saved or reverted.
2. WYSIWYG Slice Editing– Manipulate slices by dragging and dropping entities onto each other or pulling them out from a slice to remove them. This more intuitive workflow will help you work faster and accomplish tasks that would have taken several clicks in the past.
3. Save Dialog Box details on Edits– All details are now presented if you click on the advanced save option. If you’re dealing with many slices, there are now filter controls that help you default to added/removed entities.
4. Updated Entity Outliner Search/Filtering Options– There are now options to sort alphabetically ascending/descending with additional toggles to scroll to a selected slice and/or expand the hierarchy.
5. Editor Only Status– Set an entity as editor only and it will not show up in game / at runtime. This is helpful when working across disciplines or teams to drop in markers guiding developers on changes or areas that need lighting addressed.

As well as the following fixes:

Cinematics

The cinematics system has the following fixes:

• The Track View editor no longer stops working when you use the redo and undo functionality.
• The redo and undo functionality now works properly in the Curve Editor.
• The up and down buttons now work properly in the Key Properties dialog box.
• You can no longer erroneously use quotation marks in the file prefix. Previously this prevented the Render Output tool from generating screenshots and videos.
• The Simple Motion component is now removed when you remove the Actor component from an entity.
• The Render Output tool is now disabled when you're in game mode.
• You can now extend or shorten a looped motion track.
• Keys on a compound track now report values for subtracks.
• When you deselect a sequence, it no longer erroneously appears in the Sequence drop-down list.

Slices

Slices have the following fixes:

• Duplicating slice instance entities is now more stable.
• Various performance improvements include serializing slices, decreasing the slice save time, and increasing system reliability.
• Slices now have improved container serialization.
• The zoom to selection functionality (keyboard shortcut Z) is now unified between the Entity Outliner and the viewport.
• You can now save slices that have splines with deleted points.
• Cubemap assets now save properly to nested slices.
• You can now create an instance from a nested slice within a slice.
• Component dependency sorting no longer misidentifies objects as being incompatible when a component provides the same service twice.
• You no longer need to restart the editor to view changes to nested slices.
• Entering a rotation value in one of the axis fields no longer modifies all of the axes in the viewport.
• Material and texture asset reference fields are now detectable as an override when you modify these fields from the source slice data.
• The Thumbnailer component is now self-compatible.

UI Editor

You can now push a new slice instance into a UI slice.

Xenko 3.1 beta has just been released.   This is the first major point release since the Xenko project went open source this summer.  The primary focus of this beta is reorganizing Xenko to make it play nicely with the NuGet distribution system, although this refactoring has some very cool side effects.  Now you are able to use individual components of Xenko on their own.  For example, if you wanted to use the Xenko graphics library on it’s own, you can, independent of the rest of the Xenko game engine.  This release also moves towards Xenko using .NET standard.

Details of the release from the Xenko blog:

Xenko was always a big proponent of NuGet: since first version, Xenko was distributed as a NuGet package.

However, due to limitations (hello packages.config and project.json!), we were leveraging NuGet more as a distribution medium than proper NuGet packages: Xenko 3.0 is still a monolithic single package and it would not work out of the box when referenced from Visual Studio without using Xenko Launcher and Game Studio.

Xenko 3.0 paved the way by making Xenko compatible with the new project system (game projects were referencing Xenko using a PackageReference).

Today, Xenko 3.1 brings Xenko as a set of smaller NuGet package, each containing one assembly, with proper dependencies:

As a result, it is now possible to create a game project that references only the packages you want. Here are a few examples of “core” packages:

• Xenko.Engine: allows you to use core engine runtime (including its dependencies)
• Xenko.Core.Assets.CompilerApp: compile assets at build time
• Xenko.Core.Mathematics or Xenko.Graphics: yes, if you want to make a custom project only using Xenko mathematics or graphics API without the full Xenko engine, you can!
• Xenko.Core.Assets, Xenko.Presentation or Xenko.Quantum: all those piece of tech being used to build Xenko tooling are also available for reuse in other projects. Nothing prevents you from generating assets on the fly too!

Then, various parts of the engine are distributed as optional packages:

• Xenko.Physics
• Xenko.Particles
• Xenko.UI
• Xenko.SpriteStudio
• Xenko.Video

If you don’t reference those packages, they won’t be packaged with your game either. In many situations, it results in a smaller packaged game and improved startup time.

In addition to the above changes, you can take a look at the commit log on GitHub for other aspects that made it into the 3.1 release.

2018 was an interesting year in game development.  In this post/video, we take a quick stroll down memory lane and look at some of the key stories as they occurred throughout the year. 

• Epic Games Giveaway a Ton of Assets for Free
• COATools 1.0 For Blender Released
• Godot 3.0 Released
• Unity Release 2D Gamekit For Free
• HaxePunk 4.0 Released
• Unity Acquire ProBuilder And Release Tools for Free (Eventually packaged in Unity)
• Phaser 3.0 Released
• Vulkan for iOS/MacOS Added in Form of MoltenVK
• RenderDoc 1.0 Released
• Unreal Engine 4.19 Released
• Microsoft Announced DXR – Direct X Raytracing
• Epic Games Give Away $12M in Paragon Assets
• Unity Release C# Code (Not Open Sourced)
• Krita 4.0 Released
• System Shock Source Code Released
• Blender Game Engine Removed From Blender 2.8 Codebase
• Godot Gets CSG Support
• PlayCanvas Game Engine Turns 1
• Unity 2018.1 Released
• Autodesk Sketchbook Released Free
• Visual Studio Intellicode Launched
• SFML 2.5.0 Released
• Armory 3D Game Engine Released
• Apple Deprecates OpenGL Support
• Microsoft Acquires GitHub
• Armory Engine Patreon Problems
• Epic Change Unreal Engine Marketplace Revenue Split
• Unity 2018.2 Released
• Godot Visual Shader Back in Godot 3
• Coppercube 6 Released and Now Free Version Available
• Tile Engine Open Sourced
• Raylib 2.0 Released
• Unreal Engine 4.20 Released
• Pixel GameMaker MV Released
• ToyEngine Released
• Xenko 3.0 Released And Open Sourced
• WaveEngine 2.5.0 Released
• GDScript Typed Support
• Cocos Creator 2.0 Released
• Filament Open Source PBR Renderer Released
• Valve Released Proton
• Limon Open Source Game Engine
• Tiled 1.2 Released
• Open Match – Open Source Matchmaking Unity+Google Partnership
• CryEngine 5.5 Released
• Minecraft Open Sourcing
• Materialize Released (Then Open Sourced)
• PixelMash Pixel Art Software Released
• Discord Game Store Launched
• Unity 2019.1 Alpha Launched (First Alpha Release)
• Unity Release Massive FPS Example
• Unreal Engine 4.21 Released
• Blender 2.80 Beta Released
• Duality 3.0 Released
• Epic Games Launch New Game Store with 88/12 Revenue Split
• NVidia Open Source PhysX
• Cocos Creator 2.1 Released (Now with 3D)
• Epic Games Announce Free Online Services 

Back in November, Epic Games announced they would be giving away content from the Unreal Engine marketplace.  Yesterday they announced the January content that would be made available for free.  While half of the content released is available free forever, the other half is only available for free during the month of January, so be sure to add it to your cart before then!

The January free content includes:

• Autumn Audio Bundle
• Interactive Open World Foliage
• Small Animal Behavior Pack
• SDF Robo Progress Bar Pack
• Stylized Desert Environment

All of the above are available for this month only.  The following assets have been made permanently free:

• Ancient Treasures
• FX Variety Pack
• Industry Prop Pack 6

Learn more about the above packs in the video below.

Corona is an open source Lua powered cross platform game engine, first released way back in 2009.  Back in 2017 Corona was released for free, after being acquired by AppoDeal earlier in the year.  Yesterday they announced that Corona will now be available under a dual licenses, GPLv3 and a proprietary commercial license.  If you require more details on the various open source licenses, be sure to check out our guide to open source licenses available here.

Details of the open sourcing:

“The transition of Corona to the open source model of development has been our long-term vision since Corona Labs was acquired by Appodeal in 2017. We believe that this move will bring transparency to the development process, and will allow users to contribute features or bug fixes to make the project better for everyone,” said Vlad Sherban, product manager for Corona Labs.

The open source model will bring more visibility and flexibility to the development process by allowing visibility into exactly what the engine team is working on and where the project is going, and by contributing valuable new features that will help spearhead Corona to the next level. Additional benefits for businesses include the potential to acquire a commercial license for source code and customize the engine for specific commercial projects.

“Corona Labs will continue to have a dedicated team and infrastructure to support our flourishing plugin ecosystem and infrastructure, as well as to keep up to date with the ever-changing requirements and updates coming from applications stores. Powered by the new open source model and supported by the development of new features and bug fixes will make Corona more community driven — but not without our help and guidance. Ultimately, going open source will provide confidence in the future of the engine and an opportunity to grow community involvement in engine development,” said Vlad Sherban, product manager for Corona Labs.

Corona is available under a split license:

1. You can download the Corona source code under the GPLv3 license and build your games and apps, however, those games have to be distributed under the GPLv3 license, i.e you have to make your source available. Games and apps based on the open source distribution of Corona have to be distributed using the same license (GPLv3).
2. You can download the Corona source code, negotiate a commercial license agreement with Corona Labs, and build a version of Corona that has a custom feature. You can then distribute your games and apps without opening your own source.
3. This does not apply to daily builds and releases. Their license remains unchanged. You can download builds to freely build and distribute your apps as before. The new changes only apply to the source code of the engine which is now available.

The last point is important, as it means existing customers using the free engine can continue to use the binary releases for free, so long as they don’t touch the source code.  Speaking of source code, the code is now live on GitHub.

MIT have just released version 3 of Scratch.  Scratch is a visual programming language and game engine aimed at helping kids learn how to program, I previously featured it in the GameFromScratch Guide to Getting Kids Started in Game Development.  It uses a system similar to virtual lego blocks for coding games that respond to events, sensors and more.  Additionally Scratch comes absolutely loaded with content such as sprites, sound effects and backdrops that help you get started right away.

Scratch 3 brings new behaviours, a new extension system and more.  Details from the 3.0 announcement on Medium:

Scratch Extensions

With Scratch extensions, you can keep adding new coding blocks to Scratch. Program motors, lights, and sensors with the LEGO® Education WeDo 2.0, LEGO® MINDSTORMS® Education EV3, and micro:bit extensions. Program characters to speak in other languages with the Google Translate extension, or to talk out loud with the Amazon Text-to-Speech extension. You can even program characters to respond to your body movements using your webcam and the Video Sensing extension.This library of extensions will continue to grow over time, expanding what you can create with Scratch.

To help kids get started with Scratch, there is a new collection of tutorials and “how to” videos.

New Tutorials and Activities

Whether you’re just getting started or looking for inspiration, the new Ideas section of the website includes tutorials for everyone. Animate a character, make music, or create an adventure game with Cartoon Network characters. You can find more activities and full coding curricula from Raspberry Pi Code Club, Google CS First, and the ScratchEd Creative Computing Curriculum Guide.

Scratch 3.0 comes with new, easily remixable characters, backdrops, and sounds.

New Characters, Sounds, and Backgrounds

Tacos, dinosaurs, mermaids, and shoes! Beats, sneezes, squawks, and squeaks. Jungles, concert halls, mountains, and stadiums. We worked with artists to create lots of new, easily remixable characters, sounds, and backgrounds. There are also improved paint and sound editors for creating and editing your own images and sounds.

Scratch Everywhere

Scratch 3.0 is designed to work in any current browser and on a wide variety of devices — including touch devices like tablets. No internet? No problem. Scratch 3.0 has an offline editor called Scratch Desktop.

Scratch has always been more than a coding platform. What makes Scratch special is the global community of kids, educators, families, and organizations who are creating and sharing projects, developing tutorials and resources, and hosting in-person events, workshops, and conferences. We’re looking forward to seeing what you all do with this new generation of Scratch.

You can read more about the 3.0 release details here.  Scratch is a fully open source project with the Github repository available here.  If you are interested in creating JavaScript extensions, you can find code examples here.

Over the weekend, Esoteric Software released version 3.7 of their Spine animation software.  Spine enables you to create complex 2D animations using a bone and mesh based workflow, much like working and animating in 3D.  It is a software that we have covered several times on this site including this step by step tutorial as well as in our recent round-up of bone based animation packages.  The 3.7 release brings several new features and improvements including new audio support, improved exporters, new skinning functionality and a new C++ based runtime.

Major new features of the 3.7 release include:

• Audio support
• Stretchy, compressed and uniform inverse kinematics
• Mesh whitespace stripping
• Revamped exporters(Gif, APNG, Range and Crop limiting)
• Pixel rendering
• Skin combining
• Type to Search
• Skin duplication
• Vertex copy/paste
• CLI improvements
• Runtime improvements
• New C++ based spine runtime (will power UE and Cocos)

You can learn a great deal more about this release on the Spline blog or by watching the video embedded below.  In addition to the new 3.7 release, a Spine Web Player was also released, with the announcement being lost in the holiday noise!

Back in June of 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub for an eye watering 7.5 Billion dollars.  This transaction took several months to make it through regulatory approval, with Microsoft finally taking control near the end of 2018.  Yesterday, we saw the first official impact of the ownership change and for end users, it’s a pretty good change.  The free tier of GitHub now offers unlimited private code repos!  This was arguably the biggest reason for many small developers to actually pay for a premium account, so for these developers, they can downgrade to free and save their money.  Now the major limitation between Free and Pro accounts is the number of collaborators in a private repo, with the free tier have a limit of 3, while the pro tier has no such limit.

Details of the new changes from the Github blog:

• GitHub Free now includes unlimited private repositories. For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free. Many developers want to use private repos to apply for a job, work on a side project, or try something out in private before releasing it publicly. Starting today, those scenarios, and many more, are possible on GitHub at no cost. Public repositories are still free (of course—no changes there) and include unlimited collaborators.

• GitHub Enterprise is the new unified product for Enterprise Cloud (formerly GitHub Business Cloud) and Enterprise Server (formerly GitHub Enterprise). Organizations that want the flexibility to use GitHub in a cloud or self-hosted configuration can now access both at one per-seat price. And with GitHub Connect, these products can be securely linked, providing a hybrid option so developers can work seamlessly across both environments.

Pricing for individuals now breaks down as follows:

Not a bad first move…

The Panda game engine is a C++/Python based open source game engine form in collaboration between Carnegie Mellon and Disney, previously used to power MMOs such as Toon Town Online and Pirates of the Caribbean.  In addition to the 1.10.0 release they performed a complete facelift, with a new logo and a much nicer overall website.  The major improvements to Panda in 1.10.0 include support for Python 3.x in addition to Python 2.x, improvements to the shader process and underlying OpenGL renderer, cross platform gamepad support, Android port improvements, HarfBuzz text shaping and more.

Complete details from the release notes:

General

• Experimental ability to build for Android
• New input framework to natively support gamepads, joysticks, etc.
• Multi-threaded render pipeline is a lot more stable now
• New setuptools-based deployment pipeline
• Improvements to mouselook smoothness
• Cache is now at $XDG_CACHE_HOME/panda3d (~/.cache/panda3d), not ~/.panda3d
• Addition of unit test suite
• Many improvements to thread safety
• Many performance improvements
• Tons of bugfixes
• Big style cleanup of C++ source code

Python API

• Complete support for Python 3
• Support for coroutines and async/await
• Property interfaces have been added for many settings
• More flexible handling for keyboard arguments in C++ APIs
• Python bindings are completely separated out of the C++ libraries.
• Interrogate binding generator has many improvements.
• Use of pandac.PandaModules is discouraged, use panda3d.core et al
• Use of libRocket is discouraged due to lack of Python 3 support
• Tasks are now sorted in addition order when lacking a sort value
• Fixes iris/fade transitions for extreme aspect ratios
• WeakNodePath is now exposed to Python
• WindowProperties.size(x, y) deprecated; use WindowProperties(size=(x, y))
• Calling bare run() is deprecated, use base.run() instead
• downcastTo*() methods have been removed, they were already no-ops

Rendering

• Add new shader-based terrain rendering method (ShaderTerrainMesh)
• The default ColorAttrib mode is now T_vertex
• The ColorAttrib T_off mode now properly disables vertex colors entirely
• Make handling of color attributes more consistent between renderers
• Ability to create an OpenGL core profile context; set "gl-version 3 2"
• Experimental support for reverse-Z rendering for best depth precision
• sRGB framebuffers supported more widely
• Support for infinite near/far clip in lens
• Add some PBR material parameters to material class
• Addition of more built-in GLSL shader inputs; see manual.
• Add p3d_FragData[] GLSL output for MRT in GLSL 1.30
• Add flag enabling vertex shader control over point size
• Support signed ints and double-precision floats in vertex data with GLSL
• Support unsigned 11/10/10-bit floating-point textures and vertex data
• Support for SSBOs via ShaderBuffer class
• Support OpenGL FBO buffers without any attachments
• Support passing uint variables to GLSL shader
• Allow rendering objects with empty vertex data (for vertex pulling)
• Add LogicOpAttrib, for supporting logical operator blending
• Improvements to OpenGL ES support
• Support for geometry with adjacency information
• Change default alpha blending to improve blending rendered result
• New method for obtaining native OpenGL texture object
• Support windowless offscreen rendering on macOS
• Panda resets OpenGL state better before and after draw callbacks
• OpenGL renderer better supports debugging tools like apitrace
• Support fixed-depth billboards, useful for 2D tags that don't change size

Shader generator

• Significant performance improvements
• Support for point light shadows
• Hardware skinning support
• Changes to match fixed-function pipeline better
• Fixes for normal vector normalization
• Support multiple normal maps (uses Reoriented Normal Mapping)
• Tracks modifications to materials and texture stages automatically

Lighting

• Allow specifying light color based on color temperature
• Setting specular color of a light separately is deprecated
• New GLSL inputs to make implementing lighting in shaders much easier
• Add representation for sphere light and rectangle light
• Efficiency improvements for passing light information to shader
• Interocular distance for shadow cameras now always defaults to 0
• Add low-level lighting module from RenderPipeline

Textures

• Support cube map arrays
• Support buffer textures
• Many more texture formats supported
• BC4 and BC5 compression modes supported
• Proper depth textures supported in DirectX 9 renderer
• set_ram_image(_as) directly supports buffer protocol
• TexturePeeker supports more formats and component types

Text

• Dramatic improvements to text rendering performance
• Support for HarfBuzz for higher-quality text shaping and kerning
• Support for right-to-left text
• Support for signed-distance-field rendering in egg-mkfont

Audio/video

• The default unit for audio is now 1 meter for each Panda unit.
• Native .flac loader
• Support videos with alpha channel in ffmpeg
• OpenAL stability improvements, especially on macOS
• Support loading .opus files with libopusfile
• Fix various memory leaks

Physics / collisions

• CollisionTube is renamed to CollisionCapsule.
• Box-box collision test is improved to work well with the Pusher
• More box tests for collision system: box-into-plane, box-into-poly
• Capsule (tube) can be used as "from" shape into plane, sphere, capsule, box
• Bullet objects are serializable to .bam files.
• Bullet bindings are now thread safe.
• Bullet debug drawer is more efficient; no longer inherits GeomNode.
• Various fixes to bullet vehicle wheel synchronization
• PhysX bindings are deprecated.

Pipeline / loading

• Support for Assimp library to load a broad variety of model formats
• Ability to specify min-lod, max-lod, lod-bias in .egg file
• Egg file materials support PBR-style material parameterization
• Support loading more DDS files, including DX10-style ones
• Add support for OpenEXR and HDR textures
• Support line/point thickness in bam2egg
• bam2egg no longer inserts a vestigial ModelNode at the top
• bam2egg supports depth test, offset, cull bin attributes
• Accept a .gz file wherever a .pz file is accepted
• egg-palettize supports mirror and border-color wrap modes
• More robust checks against memory corruptions when loading bad .bam files
• Support for Maya 2017 and 2018
• Support preprocessing GLSL shaders created with Shader.make

Build

• We now require using MSVC 2015 or 2017 to compile on Windows.
• At least GCC 4.8 is now required.
• With GCC/clang, enabling C++11 is now required.
• Allow building with more recent ffmpeg versions
• Support for old FFMpeg versions (before 1.1) dropped.
• The ppremake build system has been removed.
• Support for OpenSSL versions before 0.9.7 has been dropped.

C++

• Use of NULL is replaced with nullptr
• WeakPointerTo now requires use of lock() method for thread safety
• Mutex et al now satisfy C++11 Lockable constraints
• Panda headers no longer contain using namespace std;
• PN_int32 et al have been removed, use stdint.h types instead
• The need to link with pystub and add Python include dirs is removed.

You can learn more about this release on the Panda developer blog and the source is available on Github on the BSD license.  You can download the Panda SDK here with Linux, Mac and Windows downloads available.

Godot 3.1 just became one step closer with the first Beta release, after several prior alpha releases.  Details of the beta release from the Godot blog:

After an alpha phase that took longer than anticipated, we're now ready to enter the beta phase for Godot 3.1, which means that the feature work is finished for this version. From now on, we are in release freeze, which means that new features will no longer be merged, and we will focus solely on fixing release-critical bugs.

This should allow to finish polishing this release quickly and hopefully be ready to publish it by the end of this month. See this GitHub issue for details.

Contrarily to our 3.0.x maintenance releases, which include only thoroughly reviewed and backwards-compatible bug fixes, the 3.1 version includes all the new features (and subsequent bugs!) merged in the master branch since January 2018, and especially all those showcased on our past devblogs. It's been almost a year since the 3.0 release and close to 6,000 commits, so expect a lot of nice things in the final 3.1 version!

While there are no formal release notes available yet, the following change log tracks the majority of changes in the 3.1 release.  Highlights of this release include:

• OpenGL ES 2 support returns (alongside ES3 support)
• Visual Shader Editor improvements (video)
• CSG support (video)
• 2D and 3D physics improvements, including Softbody and Ragdoll systems
• 2D mesh and skeletal deformation (video)
• KinematicBody2D improvements
• Optional static type support (video)
• 2D Animation improvements (video)
• 3D Animation improvements (video)
• much, much more

The 3.1 beta release downloads are not available on the primary download page and can only be downloaded here for GDScript only builds and here for Mono/C# builds.

Earlier today Improbable released the following statement regarding their cloud based networking service SpatialOS:

Today we must regretfully inform our community of the following developments.

• Unity’s block of SpatialOS: The game engine provider Unity recently changed (Dec 5) and then clarified directly to us (9 Jan) their terms of service to specifically disallow services like Improbable’s to function with their engine. This was previously freely possible in their terms, as with other major engines.
• What this means: Unity has clarified to us that this change effectively makes it a breach of terms to operate or create SpatialOS games using Unity, including in development and production games.
• Ongoing negotiation: Worryingly, this change occurred during an open commercial negotiation with the company to find a way to do more together.
• Revoked Unity license: In addition, Unity has revoked our ability to continue working with the engine for breaching the newly changed terms of service in an unspecified way.  This will affect our ability to support games.
• Continuing service for all other engines: Users of all other engines remain completely unaffected and we are working with other engine providers to see if they can help support engine transitions for customers hit by this change.

The updated Terms of Service section 2.4 from Unity now reads:

2.4 Streaming and Cloud Gaming Restrictions.

You may not directly or indirectly distribute the Unity Software, including the runtime portion of the Unity Software (the “Unity Runtime”), or your Project Content (if it incorporates the Unity Runtime) by means of streaming or broadcasting so that any portion of the Unity Software is primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet or other network to end user devices without a separate license or authorization from Unity. Without limiting the foregoing, you may not use a managed service running on cloud infrastructure (a “Managed Service”) or a specific integration of a binary add-on (for example, a plugin or SDK) or source code to be integrated in the Unity Software or Your Project Content incorporating the Unity Runtime (an “SDK Integration”) to install or execute the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server, unless such use of the Managed Service or SDK Integration has been specifically authorized by Unity.  Additionally, you may not integrate the Unity Runtime with a Managed Service or  SDK Integration and offer that integration to third parties for the purpose of installing or using the Unity Runtime on the cloud or a remote server. For a list of Unity authorized streaming platforms, Managed Services and SDK Integrations, click here.This restriction does not prevent end users from remotely accessing your Project Content from an end user device that is running on another end user device.  You may not use a third party to directly or indirectly distribute or make available, stream, broadcast (through simulation or otherwise) any portion of the Unity Software unless that third party is authorized by Unity to provide such services.

In a nutshell, the new ToS seem to prevent running any portion of the Unity runtime on a cloud based install without prior licensing of the cloud hosting company and Unity directly.  The timing of this is quite interesting following on the heels of a partnership between Unity and Google to provide cloud based networking services.

In the meantime, developers that built their game around Unity and SpatialOS are going through a bit of a rollercoaster ride of emotions right now, such as Spilt Milk Studio:

Followed by:

Unity have not yet released a public content although their forums are quite… lively.

UPDATE: Tim Sweeney, founder and owner of Epic Games was quick to comment upon Unity’s gaff here and to reassure Unreal Engine developers that this wont happen to them:

Earlier today Improbable released a blog post stating that due to ToS/EULA changes, it was no longer compatible with Unity and was being shut down.  A number of developers responded to this action, including game developers that used SpatialOS and whose games future was now in question, as well as developers of other game engines and technologies.  The only person without a comment was Unity itself, until now.

Unity have released this response to the entire issue, telling a much different version of the story.

Some key excerpts from the statement:

More than a year ago, we told Improbable in person that they were in violation of our Terms of Service or EULA. Six months ago, we informed Improbable about the violation in writing. Recent actions did not come as a surprise to Improbable; in fact, they’ve known about this for many months.

Two weeks ago we took the action of turning off Improbable’s Unity Editor license keys. This is a unique case — and not a situation we take lightly — but Improbable left us no choice. This was the only course of action to protect the integrity and value of our technology and Unity developers.

We believe that even though Improbable is violating our EULA, game developers should never pay the price for that. We have been clear with Improbable that games currently in production and/or games that are live are unaffected, and we would have expected them to be honest with their community about this information. Unfortunately, this information is misrepresented in Improbable’s blog.

The timeline in the dispute seems to match almost perfectly with Unity’s move into the networking space, as publically announced here.  Fortunately for developers who are currently using SpatialOS technology in their games, Unity insist that they should not be hugely impacted:

We are genuinely disappointed that we have been unable to come to an agreement with Improbable, and their improper use continued until we took the action we did. Despite this fact, we can assure developers that they will be able to continue development while we resolve our dispute. We are committed to ensuring that developers will receive support for any outstanding questions or issues as we work through this problem.

If you are using SpatialOS, please contact us directly at support@unity3d.com or visit support.unity3d.com so we can address your questions and resolve your problems.

Finally some justification for why they updated their EULA/ToS:

From time to time, Unity will update its Terms of Service (TOS) to reflect how we run our business and address questions from our partners and customers. In December, we made clarifications to our Streaming and Cloud Gaming Restrictions because we received requests for clarification as the industry is evolving quickly.

At the core, the Streaming and Cloud Gaming Restrictions terms are still the same as before. We received feedback that the language was ambiguous, so we updated our Terms of Service to be clear on our distribution and streaming restrictions. We will continue to listen to the community and clarify as we can.

Their summary of what the changes mean to game developers:

From a technical standpoint, this is what our clarification on our TOS means: if you want to run your Unity-based game-server, on your own servers, or a cloud provider that provides you instances to run your own server for your game, you are covered by our EULA. We will support you as long as the server is running on a Unity supported platform.

As an example, if you have made a Windows or Linux player build of your game to be an authoritative game server and run that on a server in-house, you can continue to develop, publish or operate your game as usual. If you rent a server or pay for a cloud instance to run the game, you can continue to develop, publish or operate your game as usual.

Finally, and most important/impactfully, what it means for “platforms”:

However, if a third party service wants to run the Unity Runtime in the cloud with their additional SDK, we consider this a platform. In these cases, we require the service to be an approved Unity platform partner. These partnerships enable broad and robust platform support so developers can be successful. We enter into these partnerships all the time. This kind of partnership is what we have continuously worked towards with Improbable.

… so, there you have it.  The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.  Watch the video below for a bit more of my opinion/take on the matter and to share your own.

Well… this has certainly been an interesting day.  It started off with Improbable blogging about how their license with Unity had been terminated due to ToS changes and that they would no longer be able to function as a cloud based networking layer for Unity game developers.  Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney chimed in on Twitter about how bad of a mistake this move was.  Then at the end of the day, Unity responded essentially saying Improbable was lying, clarifying what the news terms of service mean for mean for Unity developers and “platforms”.  So that’s the end of the story… right?

Wrong.

Enter Epic Games, announcing a partnership with Improbable, and a $25 million dollar fund to “help developers transition to more open engines, services, and ecosystems”.  Details from the Unreal Engine blog:

First, we want to reaffirm our partnership. Unreal Engine provides full C++ source code for everyone, and its license (https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula) ensures it remains open to all game developers and middleware providers, and enables all to collaborate together through SDKs, services, and forks of the source code. Likewise, Improbable is developing a completely open Unreal integration for its online game development platform, SpatialOS. The combination enables developers to rapidly build and deploy both session-based and persistent online worlds across all platforms with the functionality of Unreal Engine and the increased possibilities of distributed computing and cloud services.

Epic Games’ partnership with Improbable, and the integration of Improbable’s cloud-based development platform SpatialOS, is based on shared values, and a shared belief in how companies should work together to support mutual customers in a straightforward, no-surprises way.

We believe we are at the beginning of an unprecedented age of inclusive online games that become parts of our everyday lives. Enabling this will take much more than Epic or Improbable; it will take a vastly more mature, broad-based industry to enable this future: a community of companies connected by values such as fair and openly disclosed business terms, respect for developer choice, and full interoperability between platforms, software, and services. We encourage others with a similar vision to reach out, so we can find ways to make it come sooner.

To assist developers who are left in limbo by the new engine and service incompatibilities that were introduced today, Epic Games and Improbable are together establishing a US $25,000,000 combined fund to help developers transition to more open engines, services, and ecosystems.  This funding will come from a variety of sources including Unreal Dev Grants, Improbable developer assistance funds, and Epic Games store funding.

Ouch!