Game Development Summer Roundup
While Unity, Unreal, and CryEngine will receive their own pages, there are a few pieces of information unrelated to the big three that have come up since our last roundup.
Oculus, in addition to updating their logo (seen above), have continued to push forward with VR technology. They are now well on their way to release, and expect a commercial version to be available in the first quarter of 2016.
- The latest Oculus SDK for Windows, 0.7.0.0 Beta, is now available. Note that there are a number of compatibility changes with this release.
- The latest Mobile SDK 0.6.2 is also available.
- Oculus Connect 2 will take place at the end of September. The second annual developer conference, brings together VR enthusiasts and developers to learn about the future of the Oculus platform and push virtual reality forward.
- The Oculus 0.6 SDK is built into Unreal Engine 4.8, which is available now for developers.
- Oculus Utilities for Unity 5 V0.1.0-beta is available to ingrate the Oculus SDK with the Unity 5 engine.
Graphics developer nVidia has released a number of updates to their GameWorks line, which can be used to enhance games to take advantage of the nVidia line of processors. Their developer channel has also shared some handy how-tos for the community.
- GameWorks now has a VR module. GameWorks VR is designed to integrate the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, nVidia’s flagship product, with the Oculus Rift VR headset. A technical deep dive of the VR module was also released.
- AndroidWorks expands GameWorks to native development for the Android. Based on Tegra Android Developer Pack (TADP), AndroidWorks now allows development for non-Tegra powered devices, and was originally designed for the nVidia Shield, which runs Google’s Android TV OS. AndroidWorks for NDK r10e and Nsight Tegra 3.0 is available now.
- Some training materials have been released for AndroidWorks, the nVidia Shield, and Android TV.
- nVidia is poised to virtualize 3D applications with nVidia Grid vGPUs! This technology could improve virtual desktop graphically. Imagine being able to play games in a browser with blazing graphics on any device, but having thee full power of the high-end nVidia GeForce cards! VMware Horizon 6 for Linux now supports nVidia Grid!
- HairWorks adds support to GameWorks for authoring and rendering of long-hair assets in simulations, and can easily scale down to lower quality assets for use in a variety of games. HairWorks has been used in games such as The Witcher 3, FarCry 4, and Call of Duty: Ghosts.
Assets
The Game Kitchen has released the assets for the first season of their pixel horror game The Last Door under Creative Commons. This Lovecraft-inspired, low-resolution, episodic story is innovative and a lot of fun. The game is available on GOG, Steam, the App Store, Google Play, and directly through their website.
Other News
BioWare has released an open-source version of Orbit, the Java framework that underlies some of the persistent cross-platform online systems at work in Dragon Age: Inquisition and the Dragon Age Keep utility. You can use Orbit in your game to help build and maintain distributed and scalable online services. The most up to date version of Orbit (currently 0.4.5) is available on it’s website.
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