Every month on the first Tuesday, Epic Games give away several items from the Unreal Engine marketplace and January 2020 is no exception. This month there are 5 free for January items as well as 1 more free forever item. So long as you “purchase” the item before the start of next month’s giveaway, it is yours forever.
This months free items are:
Permanently Free
Free For January
You can learn more about the Unreal Asset giveaway on the Unreal Engine blog, or by watching the video below.
The open source 2D game engine GDevelop just released beta 84 of their 5.0.0 branch. Major features of b84 are BBCode formatting support, dozens of new layer effects, improvements to the integrated pixel graphics editor and more.
New features in beta 84 from the release notes:
Add dozens of new effects for layers, and allow developers to easily create extensions bringing new effects.
- See an (incomplete!) list of effects available on the wiki.
- Thanks @Bouh and @blurymind for porting, trying and setting up these new effects for GDevelop: Black and White, Noise, CRT, Godray, Tilt shift, Advanced bloom, Kawase blur, Zoom blur, Displacement, Color Map, Pixelate, Reflection.
- Want to add a new shader effect to GDevelop? Take a look at the explanations about effects here.
- Support for effects on objects will be added in a next version
New object BBText (thanks @blurymind!)
- Display rich text on screen, formatted using BBCode: customize size, color, make part of the text italic, bold and add shadows or outline.
- Read the documentation about the object and see an example online.
Improvements in Piskel sprite editor (thanks @blurymind!)
- Color index shift brush (useful for cell shading sprites)
- Ability to source all layers when using the bucket tool
- Palette transfer tool (apply the currently selected palette colors to the frame you are on)
Add an option to automatically resize game resolution to window or screen size. It's recommended to activate it especially for games on mobile phones.
Be sure to check the complete release notes for more details of the release. You can learn more about GDevelop in our hands-on video embedded below.
BrashMonkey have just launched a Kickstarter campaign Spriter 2 Alchemist. Alchemist is an extension to the upcoming Spriter 2 Pro 2D animation system that adds procedural content generation and animation support. Existing Spriter Pro customers are offered a preferred rate when backing Spriter 2 Alchemist. The tiers break down as follows:
As of writing the Kickstarter is about 10% of the way towards it $50,000USD goal with 27 days to go. Full details of the features of Spriter 2 Alchemist are available on the Kickstarter page, as well as discussed in more detail in the video below.
Spriter is not the only 2D animation package available and we have covered a number of them previously here on GameFromScratch. A run-down of free 2D animation tools is available here on DevGa.me, while we have done feature videos on Spine, Creature(video), COATools for Blender (video) and Dragonbones(video) if you are looking for an alternative.
ArmorPaint just released version 0.7 containing several new features including additional texture file formats, plugin support and even live preview support for Unity and Unreal game engines. ArmorPaint is built on top of the Armory3D game engine (tutorial available here) and is an open source alternative to Substance Painter.
Details from the release notes:
- Added support for .psd, .bmp, .gif formats
- Added single material export
- Added blend modes for layers
- Added blend modes for brush
- Added plugin manager
- Added 'auto-save' plugin
- Added 'hello-node' plugin - custom material node
- Added 'console' plugin - run commands
- Added 'profiler' plugin - performance graph
- Added 'converter' plugin - convert .arm files into .json
- Added 'import_tiff' plugin - support for .tiff format
- Added 'import_stl' plugin - support for .stl format
- Added 'import_gltf' plugin - support for .gltf/.glb format (alpha)
- Added 'uv_unwrap' plugin - auto-generate uvs / unwrap active mesh
- Added 'theme-editor' plugin
- Added box selection to node editor
- Added per-fill-layer uv control
- Added option to split .obj mesh by groups or materials
- Added 'decal tool - scale x' option for non-square decals
- Added 'menu - file - reimport mesh'
- Added 'menu - viewport - split view'
- Added 'preferences - restore' button
- Added 'preferences - native file browser' option
- Added 'preferences - viewport - vignette' option
- Added 'preferences - usage - dilate radius' option
- Added texture export presets
- Added 'layer' material node - drop layer onto node canvas
- Added 'layer mask' material node - drop layer mask onto node canvas
- Added 'blur (image)' material node
- Added experimental dxr build
- Added path-trace (dxr) viewport mode
- Added ao (dxr) bake
- Added bent normal (dxr) bake
- Added lightmap (dxr) bake
- Added thickness (dxr) bake
- Added normal-map bake from high-poly
- Added height bake from high-poly
- Added dilation pass to baking
- Added 'up axis' option for relevant bake types
- Added support for drag and dropping multiple files at once
- Added popup for editing RGBA node sockets
- Improved gizmo
- Improved height paint
- Improved .obj importer
- Improved .blend importer
- Improved outliner
- Improved node drawing performance
- Improved layer handling performance
- Improved key detection on linux
- Fixed handling of accented filepaths
- Fixed brush mask on linux
- Fixed copy-paste on linux
- Fixed window title updating on linux
- Fixed file association
- Fixed envmap import
- Fixed object mask for fill layers
- Fixed height displacement scale
- Fixed blurry text on windows
- Fixed texture filtering option for image node
- Fixed key repeat for text edit
- Updated dark and light themes
- Updated menu bar structure
- Reduced gpu memory usage
- Faster texture loading
- Undo for layer opacity and blending
- Undo for node canvas
- Adjustable viewport clip distance
- Remember window size and position
- Open node search on link drag
- Resizable ui panels
- Duplicate material
- Use brush ruler (shift) to draw lines
- Auto-set 2x scale on high-res displays
- Flat shading for viewport modes inspecting pbr channels
- Picker tool works on non-base layer
- Picker tool shows texture coordinate in 2d view
- Export single texture from textures tab
- Eraser takes hardness and opacity into account
- Export textures as udim tiles for udim projects
- Download 'texture-synthesis' plugin preview
- Download Unreal Engine live-link preview
- Download Unity Engine live-link preview
If you want to build ArmorPaint from source you can learn more about the process here. You can see ArmorPaint in action in the video below.
Terry Cavanagh, the author of VVVVVV, Super Hexagon and Dicey Dungeons, just released the source code for VVVVVV to celebrate it’s 10th anniversary. Released on GitHub under a custom license, the repository includes both the Mobile (Flash/ActionScript) and Desktop (C++) versions. It does not include the binary data however, although you can use the free version or you can currently buy VVVVVV for 73% Off On Humble right now.
Details of the release from the DistractionWare blog:
Or possibly tomorrow is, depending on who you ask – technically, the game first went live at 3am GMT on the 11th January 2010, after a very, very long day of fixing every last bug I could, making last minute builds, and trying to slowly upload everything on an extremely unreliable internet connection that kept cutting out. But I’ve always gone by “it’s not tomorrow until you wake up” rules, so I still think of January the 10th as the real launch day <3
Gosh, ten years.
VVVVVV is such an important game to me, I barely even know where to start. I wanted to do something special to mark the occasion: so, as of today, I’m releasing the game’s source code!
The repo contains two versions – the desktop version, ported to C++ by Simon Roth in 2011, and later updated and maintained by Ethan Lee– and the mobile version, written in Actionscript for Adobe AIR, based on the original v1.0 flash version of the game.
I wanna give a big big thank you to Ethan Lee, who helped a lot to prepare for this, including getting the repo ready for the public, and organising the reveal on AGDQ (hi speedrunners!)! Thanks Ethan!
You can learn more about the release in the video below.
The Khronos Group have just announced the release of Vulkan 1.2. Containing 23 extensions, there are plenty of quality of life improvements for Vulkan developers in the 1.2 release including HLSL support, the new timeline sempaphore, a formal memory model and more.
Details of the Vulkan 1.2 release:
Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the release of the Vulkan® 1.2 specification for GPU acceleration. This release integrates 23 proven extensions into the core Vulkan API, bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, improved application performance, and enhanced API usability. Multiple GPU vendors have certified conformant implementations, and significant open source tooling is expected during January 2020.
Vulkan continues to evolve by listening to developer needs, shipping new functionality as extensions, and then consolidating extensions that receive positive developer feedback into a unified core API specification. Carefully selected API features are made optional to enable market-focused implementations. Many Vulkan 1.2 features were requested by developers to meet critical needs in their engines and applications, including: timeline semaphores for easily managed synchronization; a formal memory model to precisely define the semantics of synchronization and memory operations in different threads; descriptor indexing to enable reuse of descriptor layouts by multiple shaders; deeper support for shaders written in HLSL, and more.
All three major GPU providers support Vulkan 1.2 today, as well as Mesa drivers on AMD devices. If you are a developer looking to learn Vulkan Resources Page on GitHub is perhaps the best place to get started. If you want to learn more about Vulkan 1.2’s release be sure to check out the video below.
JetBrains, the makers of programmer tools such as IntelliJ, WebStorm, CLion and Rider, as well as the programming language Kotlin have been working on a font specifically designed for code. JetBrains Mono is an open source font family consisting of 8 fonts specifically designed with reading and writing code in mind.
Details from the JetBrains blog:
For the most part of our day we, as developers, look at the code. And it is no wonder that we are always on the lookout for the best font to make looking at the text on the screen easier on our eyes. However, the logic in many popular fonts does not always take into account the difference between reading through code and reading a book. Our eyes move along code in a very different way, often having to move vertically as often as they do horizontally, which is opposed to reading a book where they slide along the text always in the same direction.
Therefore, while working on JetBrains Mono we focused, among other things, on the issues that can cause eye fatigue during long sessions of working with code. We have considered things like the size and shape of letters; the amount of space between them, a balance naturally engineered in monospace fonts; unnecessary details and unclear distinctions between symbols, such as I’s and l’s for example; and programming ligatures when developing our font.
Today, we proudly present JetBrains Mono– a new open-source typeface specifically made for developers. Check out what makes JetBrains Mono unique in the big family of monospaced fonts and try it in your favorite code editor. Have a look at JetBrains Mono, your eyes will thank you for it.
More details about Mono are available here. It is the default font on all 2020 JetBrains IDEs and is available as an option in version 2019.3 and beyond of all JetBrain products. If you use another IDE you can download the zip here. Learn more about JetBrains Mono, including how to install and configure in Visual Studio Code in the video below.
GotM.io (Game Of the Month) is a completely free hosting services for hosting and sharing your Godot developed game. In just a few moments you can host your Godot developed game by simply uploading the PCK file.
First you need to be able to generate a PCK file, a process we just described in this tutorial. With your generated PCK file, you simply have to register and account using your GitHub, Gmail or Twitter credentials and upload. Gotm.io recently launched the Game Hosting Dashboard enabling you to configure your home page and manage installed games.
This is just the beginning of GotM. According to their roadmap there are a number of great features coming down the road including statistics, leaderboards, commenting, achievements, remote play together and more. Check out GotM.io in action, including how easy it is to make and publish a Godot title in the video below.
The Armory game engine is an interesting open source project built on top of the Blender graphics application. If you are interested in learning more about the Armory game engine, be sure to check out our complete tutorial series over on DevGa.me. Details on Armory have been scarce since 0.5 was released due to a lack of release details. The developer recently released an update with a bit of a roadmap of future Armory development.
Details of Armory 2020 from GitHub:
Welcome! With 2020 already in full swing, I would like to outline some plans for Armory architecture in the upcoming year.
- Move rendering to Graphics5. G5 is a newer API being developed in Kinc, leveraging modern graphics APIs like D3D12 / Vulkan / ..
- As a result, support for D3D12, Vulkan, Metal and WebGPU will be priority. Once running smoothly, older graphics APIs will be dropped.
- Implement ray-tracing for dynamic scenes. Right now Armory already has DXR support, but only handles static scenes. The goal is to have tanks demo running on a ray-tracing render path.
- Move low-level parts of Armory (like iron) to C. This is to better take advantage of multi-threading coupled with Graphics5 API. As a result, Armory will not be dependant on Kha (Haxe), but will interface directly with Kinc (C). An extended version of Krom which exposes Armory-specific functionality from C to Haxe/JS will be developed to accomplish this.
- Armory traits will be written in Haxe/JS like usual, or anything which compiles into WebAssembly.
- For web deployment, WebAssembly and WebGPU will be used.
Feel welcome to bring up any of these points for a discussion. If you have additional ideas which may improve the project further, please bring those up as well. The goal is to keep Armory viable long-term with a modern base ready for upcoming years.
My biggest thanks to everyone who already contributed to the project in any form over the years!
You can learn more about this release and recent Armory history in the video below. You can learn more about Kha in this video and check out our recently created video on ArmorPaint, a PBR based painting application built on the Armory engine.
Material Maker 0.8 was just released. Material Maker is a free procedural texture generation software that was built on top of the Godot game engine. We previously covered Material Maker in this video. The 0.8 release brings several new features including several new nodes and examples.
Details from the itch.io page:
Bad news come first, as always:
Material Maker 0.8 is available for download for Windows and Linux here. You can learn more about Material Maker 0.8 in the video below.
Phaser Editor just released version 2.1.6. Phaser Editor is an open source commercial game editor built on top of the Phaser game engine built on top of the Eclipse editor. The 2.1.6 release brings Phaser editor to parity with the most current versions of Phaser and Eclipse.
Details from the release notes:
Phaser 3.22.0
The latest version of Phaser is now built-in. It is included in the project wizards, the Scene Editor, and the Phaser Labs tools.
The Phaser runtime files of your old projects are not updated. If you wish to update your game runtime to the new Phaser version you should do it manually. Learn more about it in the docs.
Eclipse IDE
We updated the editor to the latest Eclipse version (2019-12).
Asset Pack
#139: Use relative names of asset pack files in the new file dialogs:
#137: Bugfix: the New File wizard adds the new file to all the asset packs.
#138 Parameter to use the container folder as the key prefix of the new file items.
Now you can enable the Use container folder as a prefix for new asset keys parameter. It is in the global preferences (Window > Preferences > Phaser Editor > Asset Pack Editor). By default it is disabled.
If the parameter is enabled, when you add new assets it will use the name of the container folder of the asset pack as the prefix of the new key. For example, if you add a file
background.pngand the asset pack file is in the folderlevel3, then the new key will belevel3.background. Only in case of scene files, the prefix is ignored.Texture Packer
- #141 Show import button in Properties.
macOS Mojave users are experiencing problems to drop files into the Texture Packer editor. We added a new button in the Properties view to import the files selected in the Blocks view.
Text editors
- #142: Bugfix: cursor is lost in a text editor after save (Windows 10).
Phaser Editor is available for download on Linux, Mac and Windows here. PhaserEditor is open source under the EPL license available here on GitHub. Learn more seeing Phaser Editor in action in the video below.
Tiled, the open source map editing software, just released version 1.3.2. Along side that release was a development snapshot with new features that will be available in the next release. If you want learn Tiled we have an in-depth tutorial series available here.
Details of the 1.3.2 release:
- Fixed initialization of selected layers (#2719)
- Fixed stamp action shortcuts not being configurable (#2684)
- Fixed the tileset view to respect the 'wheel zooms by default' preference
- Fixed insertion position when using drag-n-drop to rearrange layers
- Fixed displayed layer data format in Properties
- Fixed repeating of export when map is saved by a custom command (#2709)
- Fixed issue when multiple worlds are loaded that use pattern matching
- Issues view can now be hidden by clicking the status bar counters
- macOS: Fixed black toolbar when enabling OpenGL rendering (#1839)
- Windows: Fixed context menus activating first item on release (#2693)
- Windows installer: Include the 'defoldcollection' plugin (#2677)
- Windows installer: Signed by SignPath
- libtiled: Avoid inheriting Properties from QVariantMap (#2679)
- docs: Added some notes to Python and JavaScript pages (#2725)
- Updated Qt from 5.12.5 to 5.12.6
- Updated Finnish translation (by Tuomas Lähteenmäki and odamite)
- Updated part of Italian translation (by Katia Piazza)
As well as details from the developmental release:
Tinting Layers
Layers can now be tinted by multiplying their pixels with a color. This way you can darken or colorize your graphics in various ways without needing to set up separate images for it! The new "Tint Color" property is supported on tile layers, object layers and image layers, and is inherited from group layers.
Object Alignment
Ever since tile objects were added as a feature, their alignment has been inconsistent with the other shapes. Whereas a rectangle had its origin in the top-left, tile objects had their origin in the bottom-left (or even bottom-center, on isometric maps). While useful in some contexts, this inconsistency has annoyed many people over the years.
Now, a new tileset property specifies which alignment to use for tile objects using that tileset. If you set it to top-left, the tile objects will align consistently with the other objects. But of course you could also choose for bottom-center or center alignment depending on your needs.
Object Reference Properties
This change is a big step towards the Connecting Objects feature, which is planned for Tiled 1.4. You can now choose "object" as the type when adding a custom property, and the property will be interpreted as a reference to an object on the map, referring to it by its unique ID. A special dialog makes it easy to search for the object you want to refer to and the name of the referenced object will be displayed.
Tiled is available as a free download for Mac, Windows and Linux here. The source code for Tiled is available on GitHub.
Over on the Unity blog there is a discussion of the upcoming changes to VR and AR support in Unity 2019.3. The Unity engine is migrating to a new plugin based framework called the Unity XR SDK.
We have been working to improve our multi-platform offering, enabling direct integrations through a unified plugin framework. The resulting tech stack consists of an API that exposes common functionalities across our supported platforms in a frictionless way for creators while enabling XR hardware and software providers to develop their own Unity plugins. This architecture offers the following benefits:
- Multi-platform developer tools such as AR Foundation and the XR Interaction Toolkit
- Faster partner updates from supported plugins via the Unity Package Manager
- More platforms have access to an interface to leverage Unity’s XR rendering optimizations and developer tools
Unity has developed new XR plugins for our supported platforms as part of this shift. Additionally, we have deprecated our built-in platform implementations in 2019.3.
With the move to a plugin architecture future support for OpenXR will be handled by Valve in the future. From version 2019.3 onward, GearVR, Daydream and Vuforia will no longer be supported, forcing you to use the Unity 2018 LTS release if you wish to support those platforms. Additionally Google Cardboard support is ultimately going to be provided by this Google open source project.
In comments there was further details about VR/AR support improvements in the Unity 2019.3:
Hi Felix, Unity’s 2019.3 release is coming soon, and there are new features in XR that will roll out in that update. In 2019.3, we have enabled Vulkan for Oculus Quest, using multiview fixed foveated rendering (FFR). Additionally, the Universal Rendering Pipeline (URP) and High-Definition Rendering Pipeline (HDRP) are both supported in our XR SDK, and will continue to be supported. Lastly, our new XR Plugins are compatible with the new input system. That means if you add the Magic Leap XR Plugin and Input System packages, for example, you will get the controller layouts for Magic Leap devices.
You can learn more about the changes in the video below.
The Ursina Engine is a recently released open source Python based 3D game engine. The Ursina Engine is built on top of the well established Panda3D game engine (learn more here). Key features of the Ursina Engine include:
* hotreload code/textures/models while in-game
* automatic import of .psd and .blend files
* play in fullscreen while developing
* easy to use mesh class for making procedural geometry
* lots of included procedural 3D primitives
The Ursina Engine is available for Windows, Mac and Linux with the source code available on GitHub under the MIT license. To get started with the Ursina Engine you need to have Python 3.6 or later installed as well as the pip package manger and git. Once installed, simply run the command:
pip install git+https://github.com/pokepetter/ursina.git
If you encounter a permissions error, add the –user parameter to the above line. From the examples, here is the code required to create an application and display a grid:
from ursina import* app =Ursina() r =8for i inrange(1, r): t = i/r s =4*iprint(s) grid =Entity(model=Grid(s,s), scale=s, color=color.color(0,0,.8,lerp(.8,0,t)), rotation_x=90, position=(-s/2, i/1000, -s/2)) subgrid =duplicate(grid) subgrid.model =Grid(s*4, s*4) subgrid.color = color.color(0,0,.4,lerp(.8,0,t))EditorCamera() app.run()
You can learn more about the Ursina Engine in the video below.
Unity just released version 2019.3 containing several long awaited packages that are now ready for prime time. The two programmable pipelines (HDRP and URP) are both considered verified at this point, as are a number of other key packages.
Highlights from the 2019.3 release include;
You can learn more about the features in this release on the Unity blog or by watching the video below.
After 10 months in development, Godot 3.2 has been released. The release includes dozens of new features including C# support for Android and WebAssembly, glTF2.0 support, a new Android build system and a ton more.
The primary features of the Godot 3.2 release include:
This only represents the top level features, there were a ton of smaller changes and improvements, for a complete list of changes check out the complete changelog. You can learn more about this release in the video below.
Steve Rabin, the editor of book Game AI Pro 3 have just released the title completely for free on their website http://www.gameaipro.com/. Due to details with their publisher the book rights remain those of CRC Press and cannot be redistributed or hosted anywhere else. Additionally the book is split into multiple chapters, each 
available as individual PDF chapters, although merging multiple PDFs is a relatively simple task if preferred.
Links to each chapter:
Section 1: General Wisdom
1. The Illusion of Intelligence, Steve Rabin
2. Creating the Past, Present, and Future with Random Walks, John Manslow demo code
3. Logging Visualization in FINAL FANTASY XV, Matthew W. Johnson, Fabien Gravot, Shintaro Minamino, Ingimar Hólm Guðmundsson, Hendrik Skubch, and Youichiro Miyake
4. What You See Is Not What You Get: Player Perception of AI Opponents, Baylor Wetzel and Kyle Anderson
5. Six Factory System Tricks for Extensibility and Library Reuse, Kevin Dill
6. Debugging AI with Instant In-Game Scrubbing, David Young
7. But, It Worked on My Machine! How to Build Robust AI for Your Game, Sergio Ocio BarrialesSection 2: Architecture
8. Modular AI, Kevin Dill and Christopher Dragert
9. Overcoming Pitfalls in Behavior Tree Design, Anthony Francis
10. From Behavior to Animation: A Reactive AI Architecture for Networked First-Person Shooter Games, Sumeet Jakatdar
11. A Character Decision-Making System for FINAL FANTASY XV by Combining Behavior Trees and State Machines, Youichiro Miyake, Youji Shirakami, Kazuya Shimokawa, Kousuke Namiki, Tomoki Komatsu, Joudan Tatsuhiro, Prasert Prasertvithyakarn, and Takanori Yokoyama
12. A Reusable, Light-Weight Finite-State Machine, David “Rez” Graham
13. Choosing Effective Utility-Based Considerations, Mike Lewis
14. Combining Scripted Behavior with Game Tree Search for Stronger, More Robust Game AI, Nicolas A. Barriga, Marius Stanescu, and Michael BuroSection 3: Movement and Pathfinding
15. Steering against Complex Vehicles in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Eric Martel
16. Predictive Animation Control Using Simulations and Fitted Models, Ingimar Hólm Guðmundsson, Hendrik Skubch, Fabien Gravot, and Youichiro Miyake
17. Fast Cars, Big City: The AI of Driver San Francisco, Chris Jenner and Sergio Ocio Barriales
18. A Unified Theory of Locomotion, Graham Pentheny
19. RVO and ORCA: How They Really Work, Ben Sunshine-Hill
20. Optimization for Smooth Paths, Mark Langerak demo code
21. 3D Flight Navigation Using Sparse Voxel Octrees, Daniel Brewer
22. Faster A* with Goal Bounding, Steve Rabin and Nathan R. Sturtevant
23. Faster Dijkstra Search on Uniform Cost Grids, Steve Rabin and Nathan R. SturtevantSection 4: Tactics and Strategy
24. Being Where It Counts: Telling Paragon Bots Where to Go, Mieszko Zieliński
25. Combat Outcome Prediction for Real-Time Strategy Games, Marius Stanescu, Nicolas A. Barriga, and Michael Buro
26. Guide to Effective Auto-Generated Spatial Queries, Eric Johnson
27. The Role of Time in Spatio-Temporal Reasoning: Three Examples from Tower Defense, Baylor Wetzel and Kyle Anderson
28. Pitfalls and Solutions When Using Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Strategy and Tactical Games, Gijs-Jan Roelofs
29. Petri Nets and AI Arbitration, Sergio Ocio Barriales
30. Hierarchical Portfolio Search in Prismata, David Churchill and Michael BuroSection 6: Character Behavior
31. Behavior Decision System: Dragon Age Inquisition’s Utility Scoring Architecture, Sebastian Hanlon and Cody Watts
32. Paragon Bots: A Bag of Tricks, Mieszko Zieliński
33. Using Your Combat AI Accuracy to Balance Difficulty, Sergio Ocio Barriales
34. 1000 NPCs at 60 FPS, Robert Zubek
35. Ambient Interactions: Improving Believability by Leveraging Rule-Based AI, Hendrik Skubch
36. Stochastic Grammars: Not Just for Words!, Mike Lewis demo code
37. Simulating Character Knowledge Phenomena in Talk of the Town, James Ryan and Michael MateasSection 7: Odds and Ends
38. Procedural Level and Story Generation Using Tag-Based Content Selection, Jurie Horneman
39. Recommendation Systems in Games, Ben G. Weber
40. Vintage Random Number Generators, Éric Jacopin demo code
41. Leveraging Plausibility Orderings to Achieve Extremely Efficient Data Compression, Jeff Rollason
42. Building Custom Static Checkers Using Declarative Programming, Ian Horswill, Robert Zubek, and Matthew Viglione
On the same page you can also download first and second editions of the Game AI book series. Awesome contribution from the editor and all the various others and such a huge wealth of knowledge being shared.
TerreSculptor is a free Windows based application for creating landscapes and terrains for games and other media. Starting life in 2005 as a tool for creating maps for the Unreal Developer Kit, the tool has come a long way in the years since.
On Demenzun Media homepage, TerreSulptor is described as:
It all started back in 2005 with the HMCS HeightMap Conversion Software, as a need to convert various heightmap file formats to Epic’s proprietary Unreal Engine G16 format. As an Unreal Engine licensee, developer, and consultant, I wrote this utility for free use for Engine Licensees and Community Mappers.
2008 saw the release of HMES, an updated build of HMCS with limited editing capabilities. Both of these tools are still available for download.
In 2010, TerreSculptor was born out of the desire to create a powerful 3D application that rivaled all existing terrain heightmap software. The initial public alpha release was delivered in 2012.
Since then, TerreSculptor has continued to evolve and become more powerful and feature rich. TerreSculptor is now one of the main terrain tools available to the industry. Over it’s lifetime to-date, TerreSculptor has had more than 50,000 downloads, and like its predecessors, it remains free software for any use.
TerreSculptor is still under active development, with the recent 2.0 release happening earlier this year. In the following video we go hands-on with this powerful tool and show how quickly and easily you can create terrain for your game. As part of the video below, we showcase how you can import real world data-sets, in this case captured from the massive USGA Earth Explorer website. TerreScultpor is available as a free download here and is comprehensively documented here. If you like the software, consider supporting the developer on Patreon where you can get early release access, as well as access to sample projects and more.
The Epic MegaGrant program was first announced at GDC of 2019 and is a $100M fund by epic games to support game developers, open source projects and others. The Godot Engine project just joined past recipients such as the Blender foundation, receiving a cool 1/4 million USD in funding.
The story was broke by Gaming On Linux, but has been all but confirmed by Tim Sweeney, CEO at epic, in this Twitter exchange.
Details from GamingOnLinux:
Some good news to share for the free and open source Godot Engine, as the lead developer Juan Linietsky announced during GodotCon that Epic Games have approved them for an Epic MegaGrant.
This was announced during Linietsky's talk on porting Godot Engine over to the Vulkan API, which is coming with Godot Engine version 4.0 later this year. Epic Games have approved them for a sum of $250,000 USD which they've known for a little while, but they only just got the okay to announce it.
The GodotCon YouTube livestream video link is available here. You can learn more about the Epic MegaGrant program here or by watching the video below.
EDIT – There is not an official news story up on the Godot website.
It’s the first Tuesday of the month, meaning its time for the monthly Unreal Engine Marketplace giveaway! Every month Epic Games gives away several assets from the Unreal Engine marketplace, so long as the assets are “purchased” before the start of next month’s giveaway.
The February 2020 giveaway includes:
· Combat Systems - Constructor
Additionally, the following asset has been made available as part of the permanently free collection:
You can learn more about the monthly giveaway on the Unreal Engine blog and by watching the video available below.
