Microsofts entrant into the VR field, the HoloLens, will begin taking developer pre-orders tomorrow for a healthy price tag of $3000USD.

Ouch.

First, let’s temper some expectations... this is very much a developer release, the actual launch of the HoloLens is a long ways out.  This release is akin to the original DK release for the Oculus Rift a couple years back.  This was the most recent comment about a HoloLens commercial release date:

“When I feel the world is ready, then we will allow normal people to buy it,” Kipman said Thursday, speaking to reporters at the TED conference in Vancouver. “It could be as soon as we say ‘yes,’ and it could be as long as a ‘very long time.'”

Hopefully the consumer hardware will be a great deal cheaper.  With news of the pre-order however, we did get some insight into the specs behind the HoloLens.  Taken from VentureBeat:

Here are the specifications for the HoloLens Development Edition headset:

• Optics: See-through lenses (waveguides), 2 HD, 16:9 light engines, automatic pupillary distance calibration, 2.3 million total light points in holographic resolution, more than 2,500 radiants (light points per radian) in holographic density
• Sensors: 1 inertial measurement unit (IMU), 4 environment understanding cameras, 1 depth camera, one 2-megapixel photo and HD video camera, mixed reality capture, 4 microphones, 1 ambient light sensor
• Human understanding: Spatial sound, gaze tracking, gesture input, voice support
• Processors: Intel 32-bit architecture and custom-built Microsoft Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) 1.0
• Battery life: 2-3 hours of active use, up to 2 weeks of standby time; works when charging
• Memory: 2GB RAM
• Storage: 64GB flash
• Connectivity: Micro-USB 2.0, Bluetooth 4.1 low energy
• Wi-Fi: 802.11ac
• Audio: 3.5mm headphone jack, built-in speakers, volume up/down
• Other components: Power button, brightness up/down, battery status LEDs
• Weight: 579 grams (1.27 lbs)

The HoloLens Development Edition kits come with a headset, an overhead strap, a clicker, a charging cable, a microfiber cloth, nose pads, and a carrying case.

Not just anyone can order a HoloLens however, you need to apply and be accepted into the program.

Cocos Creator is a visual game creation system built over the Cocos2d-x game engine, enabling more visual development of 2D games.  It is now available in public beta and can be downloaded here.

From the announcement:

Cocos Creator is a complete package of game development tools and workflow, including a game engine (based on Cocos2d-x), resource management, scene editing, game preview, debug and publish one project to multiple platforms.

For the first time we introduced entity-component structure and data-driven workflow to the cocos2d-x family. With JavaScript, you can scripting your component in no time. The editor and engine extension is also made with JavaScript so you can make games and refine your tool in a single programming language.
Cocos Creator is an provides an innovative, easy to use toolset such as the UI system and Animation editor. The toolset will be expanding continuously and quickly, thanks to the open editor extension system.

You can download Creator and also review the documentation.

jMonkeyEngine is a popular open source 3D game engine written in Java.  I did a “Closer Look at” jMonkeyEngine earlier last year if you want more information.  The big part of this release isn’t really all that flashy, but it is smart.  You see up until now, jMonkeyEngine has been heavily tied to the NetBeans IDE, an IDE used by about 4 people.  (Yeah, hyperbole...).  This has advantages, it makes for a turn key package but at the cost of tying the two together making for slow release schedules from the jME team, as well as adding a lot of complications for developers that want to work in a different IDE such as Eclipse or IntelliJ.  jME 3.1 is all about seperating jME the SDK from jME the toolchain.  This means jME should be easier to get started with for non-NetBeans developers and that future releases should come at a quicker pace.

From the announcement:

New Features

• jME3 Maven artifacts are now available on JCenter! (thanks @davidB and @pspeed42) Note that Nifty-GUI and JBullet still require using the jME3 private Maven repo. Please see the wiki page for more information.
• LWJGL3 support (beta) (thanks @DannyJo)
• Improved OpenGL 3.2 core profile support
• JOGL backend improvements to support new unified renderer backend
• New constructors for lights: #297
• Ability to toggle lights on or off: #393
• Allow to set min / mag filter in J3M files: #295
• Support bounding spheres with light culling: #362
• Allow overriding dead zone per joystick axis: @46794e2
• Add support for non-public constructors in networking serialization: @50b2f76
• Rendering performance improved (less GL calls)

Fixed Bugs

• Fix physics angular factor deserialization: #383
• Fix GImpactCollisionShape for native bullet: #188
• Fix BetterCharacterControl flickering: #391
• Fix crash on ARM8 android devices: #378
• Fix framebuffer crash on some OpenGL drivers: @78d2d6e
• Fix regression in Node.collideWith(): @31cab67
• Fix native bullet ray cast / sweep test crash: @86439c2
• Fix clone method for lights: @6c4e801
• Fix collideWith method for BatchNode: @1073eba
• Fix broken culling when using negative scaling: @495e0cf
• Fix FXAA quality regression: @4a37a8f
• Fix lighting color ramp feature: @01227d3
• Fix network client and server running in same JVM: @2c33712
• Fix various race conditions in networking
• Blender Loader various fixes

Other

• ColoredTextured.j3md is now deprecated

Joining the Evil Empire hasn’t had an immediate affect on the the RoboVM team, in fact, they just released a new version.  RoboVM is the technology that enables you to run Java developed applications on iOS, commonly used with the LibGDX library to enable iOS support.  This release sees the edition of a number of plugins pods, specifically the Billing and Dialog Pods, that enable you to do IAP and dialogs in a cross platform way.

Of course the release contains several other changes and fixes:

Bug Fixes & Enhancements

As always, we squashed bugs, improved performance and added some bells and whistles. Here are the most important changes:

• Fixed the long standing issue with outdated Xcode plugins breaking builds.
• Added almost all missing methods to Unsafe for greater compatibility with libraries like RxJava
• Fixed parsing of minimum iOS/tvOS versions
• Fixed handling of extraneous xcrun output
• Fixed UIRemoteNotification.getAlert() returning null
• Added bindings for iOS 9.3 and tvOS 9.2
• Fixed crash in ABPerson collection methods
• Fixed compatibility with Kotlin 1.0
• Fixed bug in debugger when debugging Kotlin 1.0 code
• Fixed another bug when compiling Kotlin 1.0 code in debug mode
• Fixed a bug in the debugger when debugging methods with local vars containing proxy instances
• Optimized NSDictionary operations by not converting strings and numbers into Java-side instances ofNSString and NSNumber if not necessary
• Increased the minimum iOS version to 7.0
• Increased the minimum Mac OS X version to 10.9
• We now link to libc++ instead of the deprecated libstdc++
• Added reachability sample
• Split Facebook pod into multiple artifacts
• Added new icons and launch images to the templates
• Fixed non-fatal exception during VM initialization introduced in the nightlies.

Starling is a flash based game engine, perhaps most famous for Angry Birds.  For some time the primary maintainer has been quietly pounding away on the next version.  Today (actually a couple days ago, this news item slipped through my net, sorry about that) Starling 2.0 is available and it’s a pretty extensive update.  Behind the scenes there were a number of fundamental changes, such as the addition of a mesh class as well as the addition of render cache.

The render cache has a pretty profound effect on CPU load, as illustrated by this graphic demonstrating Starling 1.7(upper) vs 2.0(lower) CPU usage:

The filter API was also rewritten, to make use of the new render cache and improve functionality.  Finally there were several convenience changes:

• The TextField class is now accompanied by the new TextFormat. The setup is quite similar to classic Flash — but without the pain of constantly having to re-assign the format for changes to show up. In Starling, when you change the TextField's format, it's going to be updated right away!
• The TextField class also includes a new wordWrap property.
• The Image class contains two new properties: scale9Grid and tileGrid. For Feathers-users, this will sound familiar: they replace Scale3Image, Scale9Image and TiledImage.
• All Display Objects can now be scaled uniformly with a single property: scale.
• My personal favorite: the new pixelSnapping property, which is enabled per default, makes sure that all objects are rendered as sharp and crisp as possible. No more casting to int to avoid blurriness!
• You can now attach "frame actions" to MovieClips, i.e. code to execute at certain frames.
• The Pool provides simple object-pooling for standard classes like Point, Rectangle andMatrix.
• The juggler now supports uint handles for IAnimatable removal, which prevents nasty pooling bugs.

Full details of the release are available here.

Sp3 for 3ds Max 2016 has been released, updating the popular 3D content creation package.

The service pack makes the following changes:

Animation

• MAXX-24066 Changing Frame Rate Breaks Default AutoKeyframe When Greater Than 0
• MAXX-27784 CAT Motion Editor Spinner Y and Z are buggy.
• MAXX-29434 Program error when user saves bip without extension
• MAXX-27484 skinOps.ReplaceVertexWeights not working

Core

• MAXX-28752 Customer Error Report: Program error on File Open in UpdateSnapDisplay
• MAXX-28406 Memory leak with Animation playback

FileIO

• MAXX-24692 No mapping during import of Autocad
• MAXX-29250 Program error while exporting a scene created in 3ds Max 2014
• MAXX-29125 FBX: custom attributes lost while importing fbx from MotionBuilder
• MAXX-28897 DWG Import of dwgs containing negatively scaled blocks displays incorrectly.
• MAXX-29186 Program error with Container Operation
• MAXX-26606 Scenes with many xref objects take exponentially longer to load

Materials ShaderFX

• MAXX-29612 Undo break connection Program error
• MAXX-27846 ShaderFX in Max 2015/2016 doesn't receive Shadows

Maxscript

• MAXX-28959 Add filename being imported/exported to NOTIFY_POST_IMPORT and NOTIFY_POST_EXPORT

Modeling

• MAXX-28623 Linked Objects Inherit Parent Object Scaling
• MAXX-29452 Customer Error Report: Program error with Mesh Optimize

Rendering 

• MAXX-28428 Arch & Design templates not working anymore
• MAXX-28958 Expose RenderElement from OpenEXR Layer

Text tool

• MAXX-25232 Object Scaling / Frame #0 seems to not being transferred to the preset.

Viewports

• MAXX-23386 Nitrous reflection display buggy/partly broken

Service pack 3 for 3ds Max 2016 can be downloaded here.

As part of their recently launched GPUOpen collection, AMD have released a beta preview open source implementation of Khronos OpenVX.  OpenVX is an API for computer vision.

Features from this release:

Features

• The code is highly optimized for both x86 CPU and OpenCL for GPU
• Supported hardware spans the range from low power embedded APUs (like the new G series) to laptop, desktop and workstation graphics
• Supports Windows and Linux
• Includes a “graph optimizer” that looks at the entire processing pipeline and removes/replaces/merges functions to improve performance and minimize bandwidth at runtime
• Scripting support allows for rapid prototyping, without re-compiling at production performance levels
• Interoperates with the popular (open source library) OpenCV

The current release version is 0.9 (beta preview).

Another Unity patch has been released, this one is Unity Patch 5.3.3p2.  It contains the following new features, as per the release notes:

Improvements

• Android: Audio - Don't select OpenSL output if the native device params are too bad for fast path (fixes audio issues on buggy devices).
• Android: Buildpipe - Updated SDK tools requirements for the Editor.
• Android: Editor - Added Marshmallow to the list of APIs.
• Android: IL2CPP - Use Android NDK x64 on x64 Windows Editor.
• Android: SoftInput - Get rid of hardcoded text color, switch to Light theme.
• Windows: Added a new command line argument for standalone builds: window-mode. Options: borderless, exclusive. It lets users override the default fullscreen window behavior.

Fixes

• (768974) - Android: Fixed alignment crash on some Android ARM devices.
• (734124) - Android: Fixed an issue where Ping wouldn't work in release mode.
• (762875) - Android: Fixed black screen or crash during startup on old PVR devices (Samsung Galaxy S I9000).
• (759195) - Android: Fixed bug in Texture.GetPixels for ETC compressed textures.
• (763447) - Android: IL2CPP - Fixed build errors on NDK paths with whitespaces.
• (766698) - Android: IL2CPP - Fixed crash on second startup after installation.
• (714661) - Asset Bundles: Only reimport when setting asset bundle name if cache server is connected.
• (none) - Crash: Fixed GenerateSecondaryUVs crashes on certain meshes.
• (759231) - Editor: Don't call OnLevelWasLoaded on the first scene when entering play mode.
• (747856) - Editor: Fix for clustering allocation while navigating.
• (767728) - Editor: Fixed an issue when opening a scene from the Project Browser while in playmode it resulted in that scene being loaded even after going out of playmode.
• (766469) - Editor: Fixed a crash when selecting prefab.
• (756004) - Editor: Fixed the issue of GUI.Windows background not being tinted by GUI.colors anymore.
• (754127) - Editor: Fixed an issue that made GameObjects disappear from the Editor if they have an associated editor script that made use of DontDestroyOnLoad.
• (758409) - Editor: Fixed the issue of marking scene dirty when creating prefab by dragging from Hierarchy window to Project.
• (757027) - Editor: Fixed the issue of marking the scene dirty when pressing the apply button on a prefab instance.
• (760112) - Editor: Fixed misleading decompression warning in emulation.
• (765159) - Editor: Fixed startup when Unity is in a path with multi-byte characters.
• (767222) - Global Illumination: Fixed crash when building lighting with a specific scene setup.
• (771292) - Graphics: Fixed an issue where setting a material's shader to null would crash the editor.
• (723960) - iOS: Fix redirect for WWW
• (753888) - Mecanim: Fixed an issue with Animation clip length for bundled clip.
• (760612) - Mecanim: Fixed AnimationClip.SampleAnimation memory leak.
• (756129) - Mecanim: Fixed Animator with statemachine behaviour runtime compile error not firing callback on the right SMB.
• (none) - Mecanim: Fixed assert when using Animator.MatchTarget.
• (769964) - Mecanim: Fixed long start play mode for scene with a lot of controller.
• (765141) - Mecanim: Fixed StateMachineBehaviours on layer not being called properly.
• (754510) - Networking: Send Error: val > 0 on user disconnect, results in memory write violation and editor crash.
• (none) - Networking: Fixed a crash due to wrong initialization of connection.
• (762687) - OpenGL: Fixed Graphics API switching between different OpenGL versions.
• (762687) - OpenGL: Fixed Graphics API switching to OpenGL ES.
• (767857), (766778) - OpenGL: Fixed Mesh skinning artifacts in editor.
• (763875) - OpenGL: Fixed point size support using GLSL snippets.
• (none) - OpenGL: Fixed various shader compiler issues for OpenGL ES 3 / Core.
• (none) - OS X: Fixed OpenGL performance regression on NVidia GPUs.
• (740580) - Trails: Fixed an issue where trails would randomly vanish/flicker.
• (none) - UI: Stopped raycast from traversing up the hierarchy when a canvas with override sorting is encountered.
• (767206) - Wii U: Fixed a crash on secondary error confirmation.

MaxPlay is an upcoming game engine that is focused on cloud based collaboration.  So far they have been running mostly in stealth mode with very little information available.  Today they announced several of the partnered technologies that will be integrated into the engine.  Those technologies include EMotion FX (an animation engine),  FMOD (advanced audio), Popcorn FX (real time particle systems) and PhysX (physics engine).   We are of course still missing critical information such as platforms supported and of course, price!

More details from the announcement:

This week we are proud to announce our initial set of premium technology partners.

MysticGD has been evolving the industry-leading animation engine, EMotion FX for years. They’ve not just refactored, but completely rebuilt their system to better leverage hardware on more than one occasion. Don’t believe me, check out theirvideo of 3000 animated characters. To go with that performance, they’ve built an accessible interface and debugger that will make all aspiring Walts as happy as a mouse on a steamboat. And did I mention that every single bone and blend is addressable procedurally?

If you’re not already familiar with FMOD Studios, it’s pretty simple: imagine an intuitive audio system that lets you mix live in-game, has the best debugging tools, is performant enough to never have you wondering “should I trim the audio?,” and allows you to work at the speed of sound (get it?).

Persistant Studio’s highly performant particle system,PopcornFx lets you harness the magic like a true wizard.  PopcornFx is a full solution for all of your visual effects needs with a dedicated effects editor and a multiplatform runtime built on a highly parallel stream processing architecture, which is at the core of its high performance and flexibility. Like our MaxCore™ architecture, it effortlessly threads across multiple cores with minimal data contention.  

And then there’s nVidia's PhysX. For over two decades, nVidia has been the industry’s leader in graphics rendering and middleware that takes games to new heights.  Their PhysX real-time physics engine is used by the majority of today’s games, which means you’ve definitely seen it’s fully multi-threaded, hardware-accelerated action.  Just have a look at this reel.‘Nuff said.

At the end of the day, we’re fans; checking out each other’s tech and figuring out how we can collaborate to make the best possible game development suite. Each of these systems is incredible by itself, and when integrated into our GDS and high performance MaxCore™ runtime, richer and more immersive worlds are now at developers’ fingertips.

Today FMod had a pair of announcements.  If you’ve never heard of it, FMod is probably the preeminent make of audio middleware for game development. The first announcement was the release of FMod Studio 1.08, an audio creation tool compatible with many major game engines.  The new version adds PlayStation VR support, new asset management workflow, Dolby Atmos support and more. As part of the same announcement, they also announced Fmod.io, a cloud based repository of audio sound effects.  Probably the most impressive part is, the audio files all have the same price... 99 cents.  Essentially FMod is aiming to become the TurboSquid of the audio world providing a one stop shop for sound effects.  They have also announced that music is going to be added to the service in the near future.  There is a promotion right now where your 50 first sounds are free to download.

A couple obvious questions that remain are:

• how many sound effects are there?
• what’s the license?

Well, as to how many, they claim a library of over 500,000 sounds, which is a pretty solid amount!  Granted, this is all pretty meaningless if the license sucks... so, what can you do with the sounds you buy?  Well according to the Fmod.io page:

What can I do with sounds I buy on FMOD.io?

The sounds you buy are yours to reuse as many times as you like and in any kind of project (not just games). You just can’t give away or resell the individual sounds.

So basically you can use them again and again across different project, commercial or otherwise.  You just cant give them away or resell them.  I do assume you can give away a product made using the sounds, just not the sounds themselves.  All told, it’s a pretty liberal license.  So, are you stuck using the sound fx in FMod only?

Can I use sounds in my library with other tools or game engines?

Yes. The sounds are yours to use anyway you like.

Nope.

I have to say this is actually a pretty impressive development, especially for indie developers who often don’t have access to quality sound engineers.  You can learn more (but not much more) on the fmod.io website.

EDIT – Added a video of FMod.io in action available here and embedded below.

The venerable RPGMaker just released version 1.1 of RPGMaker MV.  RPGMaker is a game engine specifically designed for creation roleplaying games, specifically JRPGs.  To go along with the release they are also offering RPGMaker at a 30% discount on Steam.

Features of this new release include:

Fixed Issues
----------------------------------------

• Fixed Paste Last Bug in the Animation Editor.
• Fixed Canvas Mode: Change Parallax Bug.
• Fixed Faceset Distortion when changing resolution.
• Fixed Battle Crash when the Damage Formula Box is empty.
• Fixed Monitor FPS Issue.
• Fixed Movement Route changes are saved even when cancelled.
• Fixed an issue that caused: If you have any changes in Plugin Manager and directly close the windows in the title bar (not by Cancel/Esc), the changes will be committed.
• Fixed Pixi Add/Multiply/Screen commands in WebGL mode! 
• Fixed States removed when failing to escape battle
• Fixed Scroll Bar in Show Text when Batch Entry is checked
• Fixed the position of index in ImageSelector.
• Fixed Save deleting bug when a game fails to save (now uses a backup and restore system)
• Fixed Actors set to auto battle will only heal the first actor in the party
• Fixed Remember Command selects the wrong skill
• Fixed Autotiles don't function the same as RMVXAce.
• Fixed Sideview Battler Bug: Guard Pose
• Fixed an issue that caused database JSON files (specifically Actor.json) to not automatically update when some changes are made (specifically Equipment Types)

Implemented Features
-------------------------------------

• Implemented Onion Skin in Animation Editor.
• Implemented Plugin Help Everywhere. 
• Re-implemented RPG Maker 2003's Class change option: Keep Level feature.
• Implemented Message Box and Plugin Parameters IconSet Viewer.
• Implemented Confirmation Dialogue on Event, Database and Plugin Manager Cancel
• Reimplemented the Resource Manager
• Implemented Return Home/End Buttons in RMMV for navigating event pages
• Implemented a tool to remove unused resource from a project
• Additional Generator Parts
• Additional Plugins: Slotmachine, TouchUI, Gachabook, Gacha and NovelMessage
• Resources compressed

A new version of the popular open source Tiled Map Editor was released today, Tiled 0.15.2.  Unless you happen to be Portuguese or Turkish (who received new translations in this update), there isn’t really a ton new in this release:

This small patch release ships with added Turkish translation and an updated Brazilian Portuguese translation! There are also some fixes, though they are more on the cosmetic side.

• Added Turkish translation (by Nuri Uzunoğlu)
• Fixed hiding of object labels when deleting an object layer
• Fixed updating of object label colors when changing object types
• TMX: Added image size attributes to image layer images
• Updated Brazilian Portuguese translation (by Laete Meireles)

The Tiled itch.io page3 has been updated with the new download links.

In the meantime, many features have been added on the development branch during January and February. And since editing of external tilesets1 is becoming a huge change, I plan to make a Tiled 0.16 release available in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

If you are interested in learning more about Tiled, we have done an in-depth tutorial series here on GameFromScratch, that should get you up and running with ease.

Faceware Technologies, a provider of “markerless” facial motion capture solutions used in games such as NBA2K16 and Destiny, just released new versions of their software, including a free PLE (Personal Learning Edition) version.  That is a term that I though went away with Maya PLE, I’m somewhat surprised to see it again.  In addition to the free edition, they have also updated their marque applications as well as creating a new rental program.

First, let’s cover the free version of Faceware.  The Personal Learning Edition is a free license that is limited to non-commercial use.  From the Faceware announcement:

More and more individual content creators are adopting Faceware’s technologies to learn or improve their facial mocap and animation skills. The Personal Learning Edition (PLE) was designed with those users in mind. PLE is a free license of Analyzer 3.0 and Retargeter 5.0 for individual, non-commercial use, including research. The PLE includes all of the functionality of the Studio version of Analyzer 3.0 and Retargeter 5.0 (see below), and will be kept on feature parity with the latest versions of those packages, so individual artists will always have access to the latest facial motion capture functionality from Faceware.  For universities and schools, Analyzer 3.0 and Retargeter 5.0 will still be available in-lab and classroom licenses for adoption into relevant curriculums.  

There were also updates to their Analyzer and Retargeter software packages.  The changes to Analyzer 3.0:

Analyzer is Faceware’s award-winning markerless facial motion tracking software. Based on advanced computer vision technology, it converts any video of an actor’s facial performance into facial motion files for use in Faceware’s companion software, Retargeter. To enhance Analyzer’s usability for artists in different countries, Faceware has localized Analyzer into nine additional languages: Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), Korean, French, German, Spanish (Castilian), Russian, Polish and Arabic. Analyzer will now also support timecode, editing of in/out points of any new video, and the ability to capture live video straight into Analyzer’s workflow using any of Faceware’s hardware systems. All new features will be available in both Analyzer 3.0 Studio and Studio Plus versions.

While here are the details on Retargeter:

Faceware’s award-winning Retargeter software maps facial motion capture data from Analyzer onto any facial rig through a plug-in for Autodesk Maya, 3DS Max, and MotionBuilder. Like Analyzer, Retargeter 5.0 has been localized into nine additional languages and it supports timecode. Other highlights include an updated shared pose library workflow as well as general speed improvements.  All new features will be available in both Studio and Studio Plus versions of Retargeter 5.0.  

Faceware also announced a complete rental option, including hardware and software, on a month by month basis:

For commercial projects that need to be completed on relatively tight schedules, studios are now able to rent Faceware’s entire real-time and creative suite software lineup in 30-day increments. Rental costs start at $340 USD per month.

For more details, see the complete release here.

Just last week AMD released AMDOVX, their implementation of the Khrono Group’s OpenVX computer vision standard.  Today NVidia has followed suit with VisionWorks.  OpenVX is intended to enable developers to create computer vision application (think Kinect) that work on the devices GPU.

From the VisionWorks homepage:

NVIDIA VisionWorks toolkit is a software development package for computer vision (CV) and image processing. VisionWorks™ implements and extends the Khronos OpenVX standard, and it is optimized for CUDA-capable GPUs and SOCs enabling developers to realize CV applications on a scalable and flexible platform.

The core VisionWorks functions are engineered for solutions in:

• Robotics and Drones
• Autonomous Driving
• Intelligent Video Analytics
• Augmented Reality

-- SNIP --

The toolkit helps you unlock the possibilities for GPU-based CV systems by adding your own algorithms and processing pipelines. Using VisionWorks in conjunction with other APIs like OpenCV provides access to many open-source CV algorithms.

Features:

• CUDA accelerated OpenVX 1.0.1 conformant API and NVIDIA extension primitives
• Framework for seamlessly adding user defined primitives
• Thread-safe API
• Example/sample pipeline code
• Documentation including Toolkit Reference Guide with Release Notes, Installation Guide, Tutorials and API Reference.

VisionWorks is available for Linux for Tegra, Ubuntu and Windows in Beta form.

Torque2D, the open source 2D game engine created initially by Garage Games, just released an updated library for Torque2D.  This update adds several new features including:

• Ability to set which SceneWindow acts as a listener
• simplified playSound function and managing software
• Doppler effect (from above changed)
• audio debug mode (setDebugOn())
• AudioDescription for defining sound characteristics

  newAudioDescription(MY_ADESC){
     is3D =true;
     isLooping =true;
     ReferenceDistance =25.0;
     MaxDistance =100.0;};

You can read more about this release here.

Unity have released patch 5.3.3p3 for their popular Unity3D game engine.  From the release notes, this patch changes:

Improvements

• Global Illumination: When compositing the directional lightmap removed the clamping on the w-component of the generated pixels.
• Win / OSX Standalone: Add -hideWindow command line option to launch standalone applications with the window hidden.
• Windows Store: reduced the amount of linker warnings when building Il2CppOutputProject and using il2cpp scripting backend

Fixes

• (762771) - 2D: Changing Rigidbody2D.gravityScale whilst a Rigidbody2D.MovePosition is in progress now works.
• (765870) - 2D: Ensure Joint2D auto-configuration still works if joint is added from script
• (763922) - 2D: Ensure that a TargetJoint2D added via script allows collisions with static colliders.
• (764769) - 2D: Stop Rigidbody2D with Interpolation being placed at world origin for a single update upon start.
• (770316) - Analytics: Fixed unreliable event sending (especially AppStart) on WebGL.
• (755201) - Android/IL2CPP: Prevent a crash in the garbage collector when it attempts to scan a section of memory used for the code that may have been unmapped by the OS.
• (738821), (758155) - Android: Added support for Vivante OpenGL ES 3 driver.
• (712890), (771890) - Android: Fixed rendering on Vivante GPUs on Android 4.3 and older.
• (772171) - Android: Fixed rendering artifacts when using native plugins and multithreaded renderer.
• (772260) - Animation: Fixed a crash when animating lights using the Animation component.
• (756463) - Animation: Prevent crashes when clips are null for animations extracted from asset bundles whose dependencies have not loaded.
• (760684) - APIUpdater: Fixed AssemblyUpdater "Sequence contains more than one matching element" crash.
• (743463) - APIUpdater: Fixed AssemblyUpdater crash upon assembly resolution failures.
• (759142) - AssetBundles: BuildAssetBundles will switch back to the original Active Build Target when finished.
• (774356) - Audio: Disabled sound manager watch dog.
• (771882) - Core: Fixed an issue asynchronously loading a prefab with a large amount of assets.
• (none) - Core: Fixed some errors with recently deleted objects (in WWWDelayCall; ClearPersistentDirty call; editor CEF integration).
• (768849) - Global Illumination: Fixed crash in some scene loading scenarios.
• (767161) - Global Illumination: Fixed light probes not being used anymore in Standalone when a scene without light probes was loaded with Additive mode.
• (751599) - Global Illumination: Fixed multi-scene baking.
• (663992) - Global Illumination: Fully repaint inspectors after baking reflection probes; some previews were not updating before.
• (542251) - Graphics/DX11: Fixed compute shader resource hazards found in certain cases when binding the same resource SRV and UAV on pixel and compute shader stages.
• (none) - Graphics: Added profiler markers on async texture loading waits.
• (752613) - Graphics: Fixed "Trying to reload asset from disk that is not stored on disk" error when non-persistent objects are attempted to be reloaded from disk.
• (772013) - Graphics: Fixed .ogv movie files with stream markers beyond 16kb not imported correctly.
• (752613) - Graphics: Fixed a synchronization problem that was causing texture data not to be properly updated when changing quality settings at runtime.
• (75508), (726067) - Graphics: Fixed an issue where GrabPass could get source texture wrongly offset in some cases.
• (772958) - Graphics: Fixed crash in SetGpuProgramName which could happen when the program isn't supported by the target graphics hardware (found on Android) .
• (765928) - Graphics: Fixed MovieTextures sometimes being black in Mac Standalone (64 or Universal builds).
• (506089), (535548) - Graphics: Prevent Projectors from accepting invalid clip planes from a script.
• (770081) - IL2CPP: Avoid crash when constructing error message.
• (774085) - IL2CPP: Correctly sort unsigned integers via the Array.Sort method.
• (773713), (768010) - IL2CPP: Prevent generated C++ code from failing to compile with errors like "error: use of undeclared identifier 'L_5'" in some cases.
• (762883), (746313) - IL2CPP: Properly marshal formatted classes
• (771835) - IL2CPP: Properly parse binary text assets.
• (775362) - iOS Metal: Fixed performance regression when doing in-frame clear (GL.Clear or command buffer Clear).
• (775575) - Linux/GLCore: Fixed one more instance of "flickering".
• (none Linux: Fixed AA in non-upscaled windows, force window recreation when requirements change for player window attributes.
• (767741) - Mono: Added IPv6 support on Windows.
• (775226) - Networking: Fixed an issue where ack didn't reset with connection resetting which lead to reliable traffic stale.
• (775222) - Networking: Removed annoying "Attempt to send to not connected connection" message.
• (775225) - Networking: Removing "no free events for message" as annoying.
• (772167) - OpenGL Core/ES: Fixed scalar uniform handling in the shader translator.
• (772434) - OpenGL Core/ES: Fixed wrong shader code generation when redirecting variables, was affecting FastBloom shader.
• (767343) - OpenGL Core/ES: Shader compiler, fixed invalid uniform access in certain corner cases.
• (756028) - OpenGL Core/ES: Workaround for Nvidia shader compiler bug on OS X, affecting SSAO shader.
• (775428), (776470) - OpenGL Core: Fixed fullscreen mode when not using native resolution and using MSAA on Mac AMD GPUs.
• (773476), (775275) - OpenGL Core: Fix twitching and incorrect rendering with skinning and UI components on GLCore + Mac + NVIDIA.
• (774558), (774216) - OpenGL Core: Fixed fullscreen MSAA support with linear color space rendering.
• (762687) - OpenGL Core: Fixed Graphics API switching to OpenGL.
• (760112) - OpenGL Core: Fixed misleading texture decompression warning when using OpenGL ES emulation.
• (760196) - OpenGL Core: Fixed occasional game view flipping with image effects in the editor.
• (757536), (757866) - OpenGL Core: Fixed stretched game view with some image effects in Mac editor.
• (768916) - OpenGL ES: Fixed non-shadowmap depth textures on some devices.
• (767419) - Particles: Fixed error message due to default bounding box.
• (773673) - Particles: Fixed a culling regression, when particle systems leave the screen and come back.
• (776187) - Physics: Fixed a PhysX crash issue in PxsCCDContext::updateCCD experienced by some VR applications.
• (758264) - Profiler: Fixed crash when adding data from thread which was started during a frame.
• (770225) - Profiler: Fixed hang when EndSample did not have a matching BeginSample.
• (none) - Scripting: introduced global define UNITY_5_3_OR_NEWER, which can be used for conditionally compile code that is compatible only with Unity 5.3 or newer.
• (none) - Shaders: Added support to the compute shader compiler to handle bools inside structures.
• (766806) - Shaders: Fixed Standard shader in some rare cases outputing NaN as pixel shader result.
• (761152) - Shadows: Fixed shadows disappearing for some off-screen shadows casters.
• (none) - Substance: All inputs are now applied to a ProceduralMaterial on the first RebuildTextures() call after the material's textures have been read from cache. Previously, only the modified inputs were applied.
• (771650) - Substance: Editor Freeze Upon Instantiation of Resource.
• (none) - Substance: Fixed broken detection and assignment of shader keywords resulting in wrong appearance of ProceduralMaterials in scenes when the ProceduralMaterial was not opened in the Inspector (some shader keywords were enabled when they should not).
• (none) - Substance: Fixed cache hashing and management issue which could cause the cache to be considered valid again after having been invalidated (often seen after calling Resources.UnloadUnusedAssets()).
• (none) - Substance: Fixed loading of files with special characters in their paths or names.
• (none) - Substance: Fixed rare crash caused by using the wrong size when uploading ProceduralTextures.
• (765510) - Substance: Fixed upgrading old (4.x) project data, legacy shaders should now be used for these old projects instead of being incorrectly replaced by the standard shader.
• (773614) - Tizen: Fixed error about copying whitelists while building on Windows.
• (770048) - UI: Fixed exceptions upon assembly/type resolution failures.
• (773533) - UI: Fixed memory leak where dirty renderers on a disabled canvas would still get added to the dirty list causing crashes on clear.
• (770804) - UI: Fixed sorting issue where gird based depth sorting would fail to recognize overlapping unbatchable items.
• (760753) - UI: Vertical alignment of text sometimes appearing higher than expected.
• (none) - VR: Restart the VR Device if the Oculus Service fails.
• (770931) - Windows Store: Fixed exported VS project failing to build for non-x86 CPU when there is a managed assembly in the project that's been compiled for x86.
• (769835) - Windows Store: Fixed game crashing when its name is exactly 20 characters long on il2cpp scripting backend.
• (771765) - Windows Store: Fixed intellisense in generated Il2CppOutputProject to be able to correctly resolve windows 10 headers.
• (766764) - Windows Store: Fixed Unity failing to build on top of a previous build when target directory is read-only on il2cpp scripting backend.
• (770941) - Windows Store: Graphics plugins now work on il2cpp scripting backend.
• (756152) - Windows: Fixed Application.persistentDataPath when Product Name contains invalid path character.
• (none) - Windows: Fixed unnecessary symbols exported for Windows Standalone Player executable. This was making some Nvidia drivers wrongly pick up integrated GPU instead of discrete one on some systems.
• (769711) - XBoxOne/IL2CPP: Allow a call to Guid.NewGuid to work correctly.

CroTeam, the makers of the Serious Sam games as well as the Talos Principle, just open sourced the engine behind the earlier Serious Sam games. It's currently Windows only, require Visual Studio 2013 or later and is under the GPL2 license (blah).

From SeriousZone.com:

Croteam has released the source code for Serious Engine 1 v.1.10 (a slightly modified version of 1.07 removing some depreciated features and making it easier to compile on modern computers), the engine that powered the classic Serious Sam games, over at GitHub! With it, you can add your own updates to Serious Engine 1 or even make your own executable for a mod project! To get started, use Visual Studio 2013 or 2015 to compile the code. Some features, such as MP3 and OGG playback, along with IFeel support, have been disabled, but can be re-enabled by adding the appropriate dll files. A set of resources from the classic Serious Sam games has been released as well, containing all of the models, textures and sounds used in the classic games. Most of the source is licensed under the GNU GPL v2.

The fact it ships with binaries is pretty impressive and uncommon in these kinds of releases. The GPL2 license however kills any idea of making a commercial project using the engine unless of course you are willing to release all your source code as well.

As mentioned above the code is available on Github.

Another one for the early adopters.  Epic Games have released Unreal Engine 4.11 Preview 7.  As always you can update to the newest version using the Epic Game Launcher.

This release is mostly full a large collection of fixes, but if you are on Mac OS, be sure to check below for a major show stopping bug! Details of this release from the forum:

Fixed! UE-25334 Tessellation no longer working
Fixed! UE-27720 Cook failure; DoesPackageExist Failed 'None' not a standard filename
Fixed! UE-27403 CLONE - Assert on Debug Editor load attempting to Link() a particular BP class during serialization
Fixed! UE-27313 Crash compiling anim blueprint with a random sequence player node
Fixed! UE-27236 Translucent particles not being cleared from right eye on Morpheus
Fixed! UE-26414 Mac is missing .emscripten file necessary for packaging or launching onto HTML5
Fixed! UE-26573 Crash in FLazyObjectPtr::PossiblySerializeObjectGuid when undoing/redoing
Fixed! UE-24721 Hot Reload fails to take effect when compiled from Xcode
Fixed! UE-27424 Reimplement GC cluster fixes in 4.11 to fix memory leaks
Fixed! UE-27292 CL# 2858947 caused a crash when opening a BP in an existing project
Fixed! UE-27352 Blueprint_Mouse_Interactions requires double click to interact with objects
Fixed! UE-27544 Crash When Raycasting Against Mesh With Multiple Materials
Fixed! UE-27254 SteamVR HMD Late-Update Broken
Fixed! UE-27751 Build lighting fails without Error in Mac Editor.
Fixed! UE-27717 Crash when rapidly switching menus and tapping buttons.
Fixed! UE-27092 With Move Controller plugin enabled, motion controller components set to 'Pad' do not follow DS4 controller
Fixed! UE-27091 Non-Pad motion controller components follow DS4 when plugin enabled
Fixed! UE-27724 Slate - Problems with RHI Thread cleanup
Fixed! UE-27757 Assert when changing name of an asset in between Launch On operations
Fixed! UE-27842 Packaging iOS on Windows fails with "Index outside the bounds of the array"
Fixed! UE-27196 Match3 crashes when opening Weblinks
Fixed! UE-27405 Functionality requires two clicks in Top Down and Puzzle Template
Fixed! UE-23231 Can't Upload iOS build signed on PC
Fixed! UE-27287 Re-opening apps to a black screen on Android
Fixed! UE-26168 naming box collision in player character renames overlap begin event in actor calling player character
Fixed! UE-25794 Sun renders dark in SunTemple on multiple Android devices
Fixed! UE-21895 Clicking button in the Window Switcher UI does not do anything on Mac
Fixed! UE-25645 Editor loses resolution when exiting play in editor with Vive attached
Fixed! UE-27183 [Mac] Metal SM5 is loading the wrong Shader Platform
Fixed! UE-27144 With Parallel rendering enabled scene renders black in certain levels
Fixed! UE-27145 With Parallel rendering enabled only left side of screen updates in certain levels
Fixed! UE-26674 Material Parameter Collections are not working on Android v 5 phones from 4.11
Fixed! UE-26891 GPU-ARM Mali 400 series phones will render an Opaque Unlit Material as black
Fixed! UE-27154 Using StereoPano capture commands crashes the editor
Fixed! UE-25747 StrategyGame and Sun Temple levels render as black on the several Mobile devices
Fixed! UE-27073 Crash Occurs When Attempting to Pass a Struct Containing an int64 into a Blueprint Function
Fixed! UE-23758 CLONE - [UFE] Deployments hang infinitely when attempting to deploy to two kits simultaneously
Fixed! UE-21157 XBOX ONE: incorrect name displayed for game
Fixed! UE-27377 Smart Links are Removed During Dynamic NavMesh Regeneration
Fixed! UE-23759 CLONE - [UFE] Project will not launch on the selected xbox, even though UFE says it succeeded
Fixed! UE-26640 Attempting to set skeletal mesh on vehicle blueprint during PIE crashes editor
Fixed! UE-27451 Splitting pins on "Make Struct" and "Set Members" struct nodes does not hide the struct pin.
Fixed! UE-25834 Selection rendering corrupted on iMac 5k in El Cap, intermittently on other macs
Fixed! UE-27552 Compile fails if GearVR plugin disabled on Android
Fixed! UE-27449 Mac Primary GPU reporting used for stats reporting is wrong
Fixed! UE-27143 Using Win key to leave UE4 breaks viewport input
Fixed! UE-27374 Map picking in Maps and Modes settings page is poor
Fixed! UE-27417 Static shadows are not rendered correctly on Galaxy S6 Android 6.0.1.
Fixed! UE-27150 Format Text nodes and split nodes reporting warning that override pins are removed.
Fixed! UE-25015 Separate Translucency disabled in the Project Settings will not render asset
Fixed! UE-24067 Post processing rendering artifacts Nexus 6
Fixed! UE-27713 User not able to get mouse control in viewport
Fixed! UE-25111 Signal 11 error when closing project on Linux
Fixed! UE-25804 Shootergame UI text is corrupted on mac with Metal
Fixed! UE-27649 FTextLocalizationManager::UpdateFromLocalizationResource is discarding data
Fixed! UE-27490 Crash after reaching a certain number of active reverbs
Fixed! UE-27583 Metal Uniform Buffer Reuse Is Unsafe, Reports Incorrect Free Memory
Fixed! UE-27811 Morpheus visual corruption when not tracking
Fixed! UE-27688 Game thread using too much CPU time when application is paused on Android
Fixed! UE-27722 SetWidgetToFocusOnActivate removed, not deprecated.
Fixed! UE-25904 GPU particles on SM4 no longer have collision
Fixed! UE-27367 Localization is out of date in 4.11
Fixed! UE-24248 AppleTV there is no audio for the installed project on AppleTV
Fixed! UE-27172 Add cvar to control additive baking
Fixed! UE-24843 Project launcher splash does not disappear after project opens on Linux
Fixed! UE-24373 The IOS Third Party library Bolts has an incorrect file name in its Build.cs file
Fixed! UE-27432 Projects show {GameName} when launching multiple times on any platform
Fixed! UE-27608 DirectoriesToAlwaysStageAsNonUFS does not get remapped on IOS
Fixed! UE-26861 Crash Redoing closing a tab in Persona
Fixed! UE-27094 Failed to package project for AppleTV from Windows machine
Fixed! UE-26710 Match3 gets stuck at "Attempting to Restore" when cancelling signin
Fixed! UE-25977 -precompile crashes UBT in a user non-friendly way on Linux
Fixed! UE-27568 Mac Crash Reporting Replaces the Game Log with System Log
Fixed! UE-24967 Integrate D3D12 update from MS
Fixed! UE-26860 Ogg-vorbis decoding not thread safe
Fixed! UE-27535 Starting position of physics simulated bp is different in Standalone Game
Fixed! UE-27133 SunTemple floor tile design has changed in 4.11
Fixed! UE-27855 Crash launching project on mobile devices
Fixed! UE-27798 Erroneous MoveFixedBody warnings when running construction scripts in game
Fixed! UE-23446 If a hot reload is performed after adding a custom UserDefinedEnum class to the project, the Editor will crash.
Fixed! UE-24689 CrashReporter: Send and Restart option fails when the agree to be contacted box is unchecked
Fixed! UE-26931 Noise Node used in UI Material is rendering Black

If you are a Mac developer, be sure to note the following!

Important Known Issue: UE-27673 - Mac crashes when building lighting. This is due to an Nvidia GPU driver bug on OSX El Capitan 10.11.3 or earlier. The solution for this is to update to the OSX 10.11.4 beta.

BDX is a 3D engine that is hosted inside Blender and uses Java and the LibGDX library for programming.  For more information I took a pretty in-depth look at an earlier version available here.  Basically BDX installs as a Blender add-on, which you use to create your games content and levels, but you use LibGDX and Java to program your actual game.  BDX exposes several Blender features to your game, such as physics properties.

Details of this release are available on /r/gamedev, but the heart of the release are:

• Saving the meshes from Blender has been optimized, which can make the starting process a ton faster.
• Rendering to a depth texture for depth-based 2D screen shaders is now possible.
• Additional built-in screen shaders include: Outline, Invert, and Depth-Of-Field shaders.
• You can now color, tint, and otherwise alter individual materials on a GameObject.
• Camera functions have been added to allow for view changes (i.e. changing the viewport width of the camera view).
• Various bug-fixes.

It’s an interesting project, especially if you are working with Blender and Java, and is one you should consider checking out.  It is complete free and open source, released under the Apache 2 license.

In celebration of the Game Developer Conference that begins today, Soniss have released a collection of 16GB+ of sound effects.  The sound fx are released under a very liberal license that grants you usage rights for free and commercial use in an unlimited number of projects.  Taking a look at the track list the collection contains 638 effects of an eclectic mix from vehicles and guns to ambient sounds from various regions.

From the announcement:

16GB+ of high-quality sound effects from many of the best sound recordists and designers in the world. Use them personally or commercially without attribution. Everything is royalty free.

View the Tracklist
View the Licensing Agreement

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

Dropbox | Google Drive | Torrent | Usenet | Direct Links

If you missed the 10GB bundle from last year just drop me a message.
I am always here and happy to help. My email address istimothy@sonniss.com or you can add me on Facebook. Alternatively, you can just drop me a tweet using the hashtag #GameAudioGDC

If their servers become unresponsive, you can download the files using the following torrent or using these Dropbox links:

Part 1 – dropbox.com/s/uyka05nv311joqu
Part 2 – dropbox.com/s/96zj2ofdgvze5ah
Part 3 – dropbox.com/s/pqaopvc3dmpj8oc
Part 4 – dropbox.com/s/cqrmrx5scw99w75
Part 5 – dropbox.com/s/9lltus6pypm64yj
Part 6 – dropbox.com/s/xsakxskgh19bpsn