#59 — February 27, 2022
From news: Epic Games has released a preview of Unreal Engine, from March 28 on Steam it will not be possible to set a discount of less than 10 or more than 90 percent, the free Open Brush 1.0 application for creating 3D sketches in virtual reality has been released, upcoming changes to the sculpting mode in Blender.
Interesting things: an article about how the developer got a job at Remedy, art direction and technical side of Dying Light 2, a comparison of HLSL, GLSL, MSL and WGSL, a report from Bluepoint Games about remakes and ports of games.
Updates/releases/news
Epic Games has released a preview version of Unreal Engine 5
There are quite a few changes in this version, including:
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Full gpu ray tracing support in Lumen.
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Virtual shadow maps.
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Path Tracer supports hair and eye shader primitives.
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Large World Coordinates for working with huge worlds.
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Lots of animation stuff.
With a complete list better in blog read.
Blender: Upcoming Sculpt Mode Changes
Developers are planning add support for EEVEE preview during sculpting, the ability to draw on vertices (Vertex paint) in sculpting mode and color attributes.
Overview of changes in Russian can be read on DTF.
In 2021, Kickstarter set a record for the number of funded game projects
How transmits Ico Partners, in 2021, successfully funded 441 game projects on the platform (in 2020 there were 429), raising a total of $24 million (at the same time, 26 million were collected in 2020, although there were fewer projects).
Starting March 28, Steam will not be able to set a discount of less than 10 or more than 90 percent
Discount it won’t be possible set within 28 days from the moment of price increase for it in any currency. Developers cannot change the price during promotions.
User promotions must last no more than two weeks and no less than one day. Breaks between discounts will also apply to curated promotions such as Deals of the Day, Weekend Promotions, and so on.
Godot 4.0 will have GLES3 for now, and Vulkan will be left only for powerful devices
Vulkan doesn’t feel well on mobile phones. Crooked drivers and all that. Command decided until sit on GLES3.
LunarG released SDK Vulkan 1.3.204.0 with a set of profiles and new extensions
Added support for Vulkan 1.3. Profiles may be used to define a standard set of extensions and features.
It can also be used to limit the ability of all developers to test on hardware with minimal specifications, regardless of the hardware in the machine.
New tutorial videos show you how to work on the UE5 project Slay
Mold3D Studio released a series of videosshowing the process the studio used to create Slay, an animated short film featuring the Windwalker Echo character from Unreal Engine 5 commercials.
Freebies/Giveaways/Bundles/Courses
Free application for creating 3D sketches in virtual reality
Icosa Gallery released OpenBrush 1.0a new application for creating 3D sketches in virtual reality with open source.
The tool, based on the previously developed Google Tilt Brush, allows users to draw in 3D space and export the resulting 3D sketches to FBX, glTF or USD.
Interesting articles/videos
How I got a job at Remedy
uplifting history from one of the DTF members about how he got into Remedy. Yes, the one known for Max Payne, Alan Wake, Quantum Break and Control.
Dying Light 2: art direction and technical side of the game
Katarzyna Tarnacka-Polito and Maciej Jamrozik from Techland told on the art direction and technical side of Dying Light 2: Stay Human and shared how the team has kept motivated while working on this massive project.
Comparison of HLSL, GLSL, MSL and WGSL
In the article considered syntax, resource binding and shader interface.
Shows how to compile shaders ahead of time and at runtime. In addition, it explains how to transpile between these languages.
Report from Bluepoint Games about remakes and ports of games
The speaker starts with Shadow of the Colossus, but goes on to talk about other games. Specific examples and specific problems/approaches are discussed. What you need.
A few moments that I remember. When using third party libraries:
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If a library doesn’t give you direct control over how it gets memory, don’t use it.
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If you cannot control the behavior of the library in a multithreaded environment, do not use it.
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If you can’t control how a library loads files, don’t use it.
He didn’t tell much about the connection of the engines. But a few points:
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Orig. the engine is responsible for the logic.
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Grafon and many other subsystems (sound, file handling, etc.) are spinning in BPE.
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In some games, the same animations (states) in orig. engine, in some they were taken out to BPE.
Connectivity of engines is minimal. Sometimes they write special layer between BPE and orig. engine. This layer is written for each project (and then thrown away), while all BPE code is completely transferred from project to project.
Developers Horizon Forbidden West changed the physics engine
There will be a report at DGC (which you can’t see without access to Volt, really) about Horizon Forbidden West, but interesting enough information without it.
Guerrilla developers ran into the performance of a commercial physics engine (there were big problems with streaming data and with the interaction of objects in a multithreaded environment) and switched to open source Jolt Physics.
By switching to a new physics engine, the studio saved memory, binary size, and was able to double the simulation frequency while using less CPU time.
Myself engine was originally developed as a pet project by the staff of Guerilla Games.
Dirty colors in digital drawing: causes and solutions
Smirnov School together with artists understandhow dirty colors appear and what to do about it.
Creating an industrial environment in ZBrush, Maya and Unreal Engine 4
Mayuko Matsubara told about the workflow behind the Refinery project and talked about scene animation.
Music in Sackboy: A Big Adventure
In their 2021 GDC keynote, James Marshall, Joe Thwaites and Jay Waters talked about how the Sackboy: A Big Adventure team interactively brought music to fruition and developed the direction of a franchise respected for its musical heritage.
Why SNK switched to Unreal Engine for their latest fighting games
King of Fighters XV is the first game in the franchise to use UE. Epic Games team talked talk to them about how the game has evolved over the years, what the future holds for Unreal Engine and SNK games, and how the team is working to create a huge roster of characters.
Modern OpenGL: Compute Shaders
The video explains the necessary concepts for using compute shaders in OpenGL. Simple examples explain the logic of how to load and execute compute shaders.
The author talks about how to improve performance, transfer results and store them in memory.
We create a unified infrastructure for the parallel development of mobile games
green gray told how the new infrastructure helped them reuse game mechanics in dissimilar projects and increased development speed by 25%.
Creating a post-apocalyptic project concept in Blender and Photoshop
Diego Minges shared information about his project The Depth of Green, talked about what he likes most about working as a concept artist, and gave some advice to beginners.
Press Y to cry: creating emotions in a video game
In his talk, Andrew Walsh looks at the existing narrative models “Press Y to cry”, “X to kiss” or “O to contemplate the existential nature of the universe”, and explores a number of other models and solutions to enhance emotions during the game.
Study of the Capcom CPS-1 graphics system
The CPS-1 was very powerful at the time of release. You could use 6 layers in any order. Developers could use three tile map background layers (SCROLL1, SCROLL2, SCROLL3), one OBJ layer (where tiles are combined into sprites) and two starfields (STAR1, STAR2).
There is interesting way explore how these layers were used by modifying the Mame video/cps1.cpp driver. The remainder of this article explores the CPS-1 game architecture using color codes.
How The Hook Helped With You Stand Out Among Free Games On Steam
In the article the authors dropped in behind the scenes of a short free game to explore her performance and how she got to where she is today.
Why is sprintf scaling badly
For some reason, on Macs in a multi-threaded environment, the expected acceleration is not observed.
Aras Prankevicius decided to sort it outwhy this is happening and how to fix it.
Miscellaneous
3D version of Cara Delevingne
author Natalia Stolarts.
Pixel art shaders in Unity
Artist in the future plans release a few tutorials to explain the process of creating a shader in more detail.
Abandoned house generator in Blender
sozap 3d artist shared the results of an experiment with geometric nodes in Blender.
