Game Dev Digest — Issue #193 - New Tools, Open Source, And More

Issue #193 - New Tools, Open Source, And More

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Some tools introduced, others explained, and more great resources. Enjoy!

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The new Water System in Unity 2022 LTS and 2023.1 - Today, we spotlight the new Unity Water System, introduced for the first time in HDRP as part of the 2022.2 Tech Stream, with a focus on rendering. The upcoming 2023.1 Tech Stream extends the system’s feature set for better integration with worlds and gameplay.
Unity

Now available: 12 recipes for popular visual effects using the Universal Render Pipeline - Our new cookbook for Universal Render Pipeline (URP) effects is now available to download for free. This guide provides 12 recipes for popular visual effects that can be applied to a wide range of games, art styles, and platforms. Get ready to cook up Renderer Features, GPU-instantiated meshes, decals, volumetric materials, and more.
Unity

The complete guide to publishing free software video games - What will your game’s legacy be? Will it be forgotten entirely, unable to run on contemporary platforms? Will it be source-available, occasionally useful to the devoted player, but with little reach beyond? Perhaps it goes the way of DOOM, living forever in ports to hundreds of devices and operating systems. Maybe it goes the way of Quake, its soul forever a part of the beloved classics of the future. If you keep the source code closed, the only conclusion is the first: enjoyed once, now forgotten. [Also check out Sustainable Server Infrastructure For Open Source Games]
writefreesoftware.org

Unity Technologies' Unity 2022 LTS Release Explained - Senior Vice President and General Manager of Unity’s Unity Editor, Runtime, and Ecosystem Ralph Hauwert discussed the latest Unity 2022 LTS release and spoke about its features and improvements.
80.lv

Using StringBuilder To Replace Values - We commonly think of StringBuilder as a class to build up new string values, but it didn’t occur to me that StringBuilder could also be used to alter an existing string efficiently.
khalidabuhakmeh.com

Game Accessibility Guidelines - Simple considerations or design decisions that apply to most game mechanics. Not every guideline will apply to your game, but those that do will benefit large numbers of gamers, and are easy to implement if thought about early enough.
gameaccessibilityguidelines.com

Chunk Iteration in Entities 1.0 - I have this article from 2018 which describes how to code the most fundamental thing to do in Unity’s ECS: chunk iteration. I think it needs an update now that Entities 1.0 has been released. There are now 5 ways to do this. I’m just going to discuss my preferred ones since I think they are more useful in a real production code.
coffeebraingames.wordpress.com

Introducing Unity Muse and Unity Sentis, AI-powered creativity - Today we’re announcing two new AI products: Unity Muse, an expansive platform for AI-driven assistance during creation, and Unity Sentis, which allows you to embed neural networks in your builds to enable previously unimaginable real-time experiences.
Unity

Videos

Building a living world in Everdream Valley | Unity Creator Spotlight - hello everyone welcome to Unity's Creator Spotlight series. If it's your first time this is a show where you get a rare in-engine look at incredible made with Unity. [Also in this series 2D Lights, Level Design and Animation in CONVERGENCE]
Unity

Stencil Buffer and Portals | Unity Shader Tutorial | English Captions. - In this video, we're going to talk about the "Stencil Buffer" and how to use it to achieve different depth effects on hard surfaces with Unity. Such effects include hiding an object or using it to show or mask inner rooms.
Game Slave

Finding the BEST sine function for Nintendo 64 - Because it's so tricky and expensive to calculate the exact sine or cosine of a value computers have to use an approximation algorithm instead. Mario 64 was one of the first games to come across this issue. The way they handled it, or variation of the method, became the standard for most N64 games, but what if I told you there's room for improvement. I bet you want to see how. You are going to learn a lot of math today and you will like it
Kaze Emanuar

Coding Adventure: Making a Stronger Chess Engine - Trying to improve an old chess bot by experimenting with various interesting techniques.
Sebastian Lague

Dear Game Developers, Stop Messing This Up! - DeltaTime. This video is all about that mysterious variable that oh so many game developers seem to struggle with. How to use DeltaTime correclty? I got the answers and hope this video will help to deepen your understanding about how to make frame rate independent video games.
Jonas Tyroller

Assets

XFur Studio 3 - Personal Edition - XFur Studio 3 is the most complete fur rendering system for Unity. Nominated for the Unity Awards 2018, XFur Studio 3 has been designed for extreme performance, quality and ease of use.

XFur Studio 3 - Personal Edition allows you to add realistic, fully customizable and efficient GPU accelerated fur simulations compatible with all platforms and rendering pipelines to your game within seconds and in just a few clicks, including advanced effects such as snow, wind and physics!

[Get it 50% off now as a new release discount for a limited time!]
Irreverent Software Affiliate

[Editor Tool] Better ScriptableObject Inspector-Editing - Jumping from the player inspector to the scriptableObject, changing the property, jumping back to the player, maybe accessing another scriptable with movement data, changing this object, testing the changes, jumping back to the various scriptables, making alterations, iterating, and so on. It can get quite tiring, altering multiple scriptables at once. One thing that would help a lot, would be to display the scriptables member variables within the components inspector gui. [See user solutions in the replies here and here]
forum.unity.com/ Open Source

Hey Area Object Spawner v1.3 - Spawn Random Objects Inside The Complex Areas! (in unity). Hey Area Object Spawner is a user-friendly level design tool that enables you to generate random objects within a complex area on a terrain. The spawning hierarchy system allows for the efficient creation of complex area spawning systems (defined as polygons from points), saving you time in level design!
JahnStar Open Source

Widget Manager - Manages your game UI's load and unload UI by single call. It loads new UI on top of stack.
Ahmed310 Open Source

Physics Utils - Scripts and utilities for working with physics in Unity projects.
zigurous Open Source

DOTS-Hybrid-Simulation-Worlds - A framework for using FixedUpdate in a simulation world which is linked to a GameObject-based presentation layer.
tbg10101 Open Source

Unity GPU Based Occlusion Culling - It is an early prototype of custom occlusion culling system, for both static and dynamic objects. This asset is intended especially for situations, when you can't use benefits from built-in Unity Occlusion Culling (loading custom prefabs from bundles or Streaming Assets), you use forward rendering and high-poly geometry etc.
przemyslawzaworski Open Source

Unity Build Runner - This tool enable you stdout Unity Build log on windows, and control Timeout.
guitarrapc Open Source

Flexalon 3D Grid Layout (Free) - Use the 3D Grid Layout to uniformly arrange gameObjects. Objects are placed in cells in column-row-layer order, with options for spacing and alignment. Alternatively, use the Flexalon Grid Cell component to specify in which cell a gameObject should be placed.
Virtual Maker Affiliate

Publisher Sale - 50% off DEXSOFT - Get 50% off DEXSOFT assets – now until July 6. PLUS, get Weather TV Studio 2 or FREE with code DEXSOFT.
Unity Affiliate

DReCon Unity Implementation - This is a reimplementation of the Drecon paper for user controlled physically-simulated characters using Unity-ML Agents.
AliBharwani Open Source

UnityMvvmToolkit - A package that brings data-binding to your Unity project.
LibraStack Open Source

Features - A decentralized audio playing system for Unity, designed for simplicity and built to scale!
jackyyang09 Open Source

FastIK - Unity Inverse Kinematics made easy
ditzel Open Source

ULox - A bytecode interpreted scripting language for games in Unity.
stevehalliwell Open Source

Unity Hidden Gems Bundle - Tools & art treasures for Unity creators from the Unity Asset Store.
Bring your game to life—and make dev life a little easier—with this bundle of hidden-gem tools and art assets for Unity creators. Enhance your process with tools to enhance help draw, debug, create dialogue, make AI-generated maps, and much more. Get art assets & tools to build worlds with volumetric clouds, 3D lands filled with snow and ice, or fantasy realms with pixel-art monsters. Unleash your creativity, save time, and make the game you’ve been dreaming of—and help support Girls Make Games Scholarship Fund with your purchase.
This is an official bundle created by the Unity Asset Store, supporting the asset publishers featured.
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Multiverse Of Music - An Ovani Music Sample Bundle - Realms of royalty-free music! Embark on an unforgettable audio adventure with our thrilling new bundle in partnership with Ovani Sound! Experience a variety of genres, from the thunderous Metal Music Pack and mesmerizing Electronic Music Pack to the enchanting Fantasy Music Pack, spine-chilling Horror Music Pack, nostalgic Chiptune Music Pack, and more—over 500 music files total. Score your game, film, or other creative project, and help support the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, amplifying the power of music and compassion.
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Myth Caller: The Nightmare Shaman - Myth Caller: The Nightmare Shaman is a 3D collectathon platformer fused with a monster-catching RPG! Catch monsters, collect permanent upgrades, and unlock even more of this huge 90's-inspired world.

[You can visit their website, wishlist on Steam and follow them on Twitter]
Karatkuro

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