Video Game Engines

[MetalCaveman]

https://xenko.com/

 

Xenko now it's free for personal use and for small studios (less than 200,000 annual revenue). Looks cool, and it has some nifty features. Specially that navigation stuff, though my interest in it comes from how hard it is to get 3D navigation working in Godot.  

[MetalCaveman]

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-gets-new-animation-tree-state-machine

 

https://godotengine.org/article/optional-typing-gdscript

 

One of my favourite things about UE is how easy it is to set animation blend spaces and state machines, this new update brings Godot closer to that ease of use. \m/ \m/

 

The addition of optional typing is also a welcomed update.  

[MetalCaveman]

Xenko is now open source (MIT license):

 

https://xenko.com/blog/xenko-opensource-mit/

[MetalCaveman]

So this is a thing:

 

https://www.mcvuk.com/development/unity-blocks-improbables-spatial-os-all-live-and-in-development-games-affected

 

Unity has blocked Spatial OS, stemming from changes to their license, Unity has been silent for now, but as some people have pointed out, this could be the result of Unity trying to get into cloud based streaming/servers/stuff themselves.

 

Meanwhile, Epic are not letting this opportunity go to waste:

 

 

 

[MetalCaveman]

Unity's response:

 

https://blogs.unity3d.com/es/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improbables-blog-post-and-why-you-can-keep-working-on-your-spatialos-game/

 

Though they say Improbable are at fault here, the truth is that their ToS is a nightmare to go through, and there's still a ton of issues with that.

 

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-games-and-improbable-working-together-for-developers

 

Epic and Improbable are launching a 25,000,000 fund to help developers transition to "more open engines, services and ecosystems".

[MetalCaveman]

 

That's pretty cool, of course, it remains to be seen how it'll be used, but still, looks pretty cool so far.  

 

More importantly though, for smaller users, UE now waives all royalties until your first million in gross revenue. That's some good news.

[TheMightyEthan]

If that's really running on PS5 hardware that's badass. When I saw it I assumed it was a target render, "what we expect it to look like."

[MetalCaveman]

 

 

Godot 4.0 is going to be awesome.   \m/ \m/

[MetalCaveman]

 

 

[MetalCaveman]

https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/unity-acquires-weta-digital-1235107544/

 

Unity acquires the technology division of Weta digital, for $1.6 billion... Holy moly.

 

Would be cool if they made them more accessible, like how Epic offers free tools or heavy discounts from anything they acquire, knowing Unity however, this is seriously unlikely.

[MetalCaveman]

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-donation-opgames

 

Godot (and Blender) receiving 100K from OP Games, sounds good and it's supposed to come with no strings attached, however, it does leave a bad taste given that OP Games are in the business of NFTs/Crypto/Metaverse/other BS.

 

As long as it doesn't affect the development and future of Godot and Blender this might not be too bad, however, if they start trying to push both towards NFT integration... That'd be a shame, though the advantage is that they can be forked and continued without that stuff.

[MetalCaveman]

This is pretty neat:

 

 

Godot 4 now has a CharacterBody3D node, which comes with a 3D movement template script. Before you had to start from a KinematicBody3D and add all code on your own.

 

Now, if we could get some boilerplate done for the camera node, that'd be sweet.

[TheMightyEthan]

lol, I don't know why, but the fact that one of the functions is called "is_on_the_floor()" cracks me up.

[MetalCaveman]

The Machinery game engine is toast, and it went in one of the most spectacular ways possible, they announced that all licenses would be terminated and amended the EULA to state:

 

Quote

Upon the termination of your license, you must immediately (a) cease all use of the Service and the Content, and (b) destroy any copies of the Service or Content in your possession, custody or control, including any related source code and/or binaries of the Service or the Content.

 

https://ourmachinery.com/

 

Being that this was a pay engine that means that anyone who bought a license and had work done with it is now fucked.

 

Be interesting to see what happens to schools who had licensed the engine as they had some offers for educators and students.

 

In other news, the new tilemap editor in Godot 4 is pretty neat, still not as easy to use and feature complete as a dedicated tool like Tiled, but it's pretty darn close, specially with how easy it is to add and edit tile properties directly from the editor, can't wait for the full release (currently in Alpha). \m/ \m/

 

Oh, and I guess I never posted about it here, but UE5 is now available in full release, and it's quite a thing, the Lyra starter game they offer for free is quite good, new mannequins come with integrated IK from the start and look much better than the UE4 ones and there's a bunch of other tools and additions that range from very useful to somewhat situational but still good to have.

[MetalCaveman]

Epic just announced a whole bunch of things.

 

- UEFN

 

Unreal Editor for Fortnite, a version of the Unreal Editor designed to work directly with Fortnite, basically now you have access to most (if not all) of the UE's features, but in a way that's easier to use if you want to create stuff for Fortnite, UE's scripting language, Verse is also going live with this release, though apparently it's still far from a release on the UE 5.

 

- Fab

 

Combining the Unreal Marketplace, SketchFab, QuixelBridge and ArtStation, you'll be able to buy and sell assets, not only for Unreal Engine, but for other engines and programs as well.

 

- UE 5.2

 

With a new shading system, Substrate, as well as some other fixes and additions.

 

- MetaHuman Animator

 

Wish this thing worked on android phones, allows you to use your iphone camera to record facial animations, you can also use this with a more professional helmet mounted camera system.

 

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/dive-into-epic-s-announcements-from-gdc-2023

[MetalCaveman]

https://vroid.com/en/studio

 

That's a pretty neat and easy way to make custom characters for your games, I think it's meant to be used for VTubers and VR Chat stuff, but there's a bunch of plugins you can use to import VRM into a bunch of different engines.

 

Played with it for a bit and I'm happy with how easy it is to use, and how easy it was to set up in UE5 with the retargeter, a fun surprise once I checked some of the animations, vroid characters include... physics.

 

Only downside is that this only works if you're going for that anime style.

[MetalCaveman]

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

 

That's going to be a thing, while the changes to Unity Personal are mostly an improvement, their new per install fees are going to be a huge issue for a lot of devs.

[MetalCaveman]

 

 

 

 

At 51:50, that demo of their new MegaLight system is pretty cool, nanite for lights, running on PS5 (not Pro, base PS5), nanite for skeletal meshes is pretty cool too, some interesting features, though they're experimental for now so def not ready for production work.

 

On the not so positive side, with Fab (their new marketplace), access to megascans stuff is no longer free for UE5 users, supposedly you'll be able to claim some stuff for free when Fab launches but I'm not sure how much of it will be available.

 

Fab has some other issues, written reviews, Q&A and other stuff will not be available on the new store either. Don't know if they'll also keep doing the "free for the month" thing.