GameDev Tools weekly - Issue 1 — February 14, 2021
Hey!
This is the first issue of GameDev Tools weekly made by Alexander Pirogov and Victor Stepanov. We are going to be looking for interesting and relevant Game Tools related articles/videos/news and events. We were inspired by the work of Jendrik Illner, Harry Alisavakis, so we got together to create something similar for Tools!
We are going to keep it simple!
We hope you enjoy it!
P.S. If you know something from the game tools world that we missed, drop us a hint! Thanks!
A file dialog for Dear ImGui? Sign me up!
Mentioned by Geoff Evans in the #gui-toolkits of the Toolsmiths Slack
ImFileDialog: a file dialog library for Dear ImGui
— dfranx (@dfranx_) February 7, 2021
Source: https://t.co/APCIKU9ASj#gamedev #indiedev @ocornut pic.twitter.com/QDgJBKNrdt
Unreal Engine 4: Control Rig
Walkthrough for the latest animation features available in Control Rig for Unreal Engine 4.26.
No timestamps on a tutorial video in 2021? Shame!
0:12:04 Mannequin Rig Demo (Control Rig Mannequin Sample update)
0:52:17 Rig Sharing (Setup graph & Components)
1:06:21 Ridin' Pig Demo (Attaching Control Rigs)
1:18:55 Slope Warping Demo (Runtime Post-Processing Rigging)
1:42:58 When Robbots Attack Demo (Driving gameplay with Control Rig)
1:50:29 Meerkat Demo (Film-Quality Rigging with Control Rig)
2:07:00 Q&A
Asset Import Pipelines on the Our Machinery podcast
A great conversation about a broad topic such as asset import pipelines.
They cover asset formats, challenges with materials, challenges with converting into a target runtime format. They go into detail about how they approach solving these issues in the pipeline they are working on.
If you are interested in this topic checkout “Tools Tutorial Day: A Tale of Three Data Schemas” (slides, video), “The Future of Scene Description on ‘God of War’” (slides, video) as well.
We chat about Asset Import Pipelines on the #podcast today #gamedev https://t.co/y1nSmviOyk
— Our Machinery (@ourmachinery) February 9, 2021
Blizzard Diablo IV debugs Linux core dumps from Visual Studio
Extra note about comments - people surprised that Blizzard devs are ready to go through extra hoops to avoid working on the target platform. Not surprised at all, VS has a great debugger that is miles ahead of any command line tool that I have tried on Linux OS. I’d go 2 times extra setup steps to avoid Linux debuggers at all cost.
Applying textures to procedurally generated trees
Interesting approach of extracting texture from photogrammetry of a tree and applying it to procedurally generated trees.
How to merge a 3D scan and Procedural (MTree) tree in #blender #b3d (thanks to @ClassyDogFilms for the tree pics!) pic.twitter.com/Y4aTsCnr9U
— Jan van den Hemel (@JanvandenHemel) February 9, 2021
Implementing a font reader from scratch! Easy??
When you want to control every single letter in your game.
If you missed part 1, here is a link!https://t.co/IwtRj67p9A
— Handmade Network (@handmade_net) February 4, 2021
Microsoft Visual Studio .props files and Conan
Resolving VS dependencies with .props files and Conan packages
Managing dependencies in Visual Studio C++ projects with property fileshttps://t.co/OB4ZAlkqJt
— conan.io (@conan_io) February 10, 2021
New blog post using @pocoproject @opencvlibrary and #imgui#cplusplus #microsoft pic.twitter.com/67TsQ1Py5e
Hot reloading
Example of adding hot reloading to your C++ project using the cr.h library .
New blog about code I've been working on recently mostly aided by hot reloading c++ using @fungos /cr 🙌🏻https://t.co/GdILC653Ce
— Alex Dixon (@polymonster) February 6, 2021
State of Qt and CMake
A lot of interesting stuff was added by the Qt team to new versions of CMake, including Unity builds and pre-compiled headers.
During the development of #Qt6, we collaborated with @kitware to ensure #CMake would work optimally as the new build system. Read about the benefits this project has brought to the Qt Project and the larger CMake community here. https://t.co/eZufcZuWkx#QtDev #Software #Developer
— Qt (@qtproject) February 10, 2021
Rust foundation started
AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are showing their support for Rust.
Hello, Rust! 🎉
— Mozilla Developer (@mozhacks) February 8, 2021
Today Mozilla is thrilled to join the Rust community in announcing the formation of the @rust_foundation.
The Rust Foundation will be the home of the popular Rust programming language that began within Mozilla. https://t.co/I8saIilYgW
USD Working Group Meeting 1-20-21
USD + WebRTC: enabling a shard document state that can be shared between multiple users.
Unity is updating their undo system
What UX features does your undo system have?
#Unity friends - we are implementing a ground up rewritten Undo System, fixing some long standing behaviours.
— Will Goldstone II, esq. (@willgoldstone) February 10, 2021
What UX / features would you like built on top of this new system? Step back/forward? Undo History window? Macros? API wise? tell me! #gamedev #unity3d pic.twitter.com/IUSdGYRWDB
Engineering tools for designers with Legends of Runeterra
Find out how Riot Games is implementing their new scripting system.
Interesting, describing game objects with Python code. Haven’t seen this in awhile. :)
a separate script that generates fake Python that we use for autocomplete when the Python script writers deal with these alien C# objects
Finally, we wrote a plugin for Visual Studio Code that gives designers direct access to available methods.
That sounds like .pyi files with extra steps. Would be really interesting to know more about this system.
SDL is moving to GitHub
Even more tools, libraries, and frameworks can be found on GitHub.
SDL moving to GitHub https://t.co/kLaR5MdXMa
— Ryan C. Gordon (@icculus) February 9, 2021
Arseny Kapoulkine “On Proebsting’s Law, or How Does clang 2.7 Hold Up In 2021?”
TL;DR LLVM 11 tends to take 2x longer to compile code with optimizations, and as a result produces code that runs 10-20% faster (with occasional outliers in either direction), compared to LLVM 2.7 which is more than 10 years old. Want your game run faster? Update compiler. Want your build times to keep sane numbers? Buy threadrippers :’(
On Proebsting's Law, or How Does clang 2.7 Hold Up In 2021?https://t.co/LbhBIwuftw
— Arseny Kapoulkine (@zeuxcg) January 31, 2021
The Toolsmiths updates:
Immediate mode gui
vsretained mode gui
discussion in the #gui-toolkits- News about Toolsmiths @ GDC 2021 in #general
- GDC Tools Summit
- We are waiting for your submissions for the GDC 2021 Tools Summit !
- GDC Tools Roundtables:
- Join us this summer at the virtual Tools Roundtables!
- GDC Tools Summit
- We are starting the 3rd season of the Vault Club in our Discord Server.
Join the Toolsmiths Slack to chat about these topics and more!!
Did You Know??
There is a shader IDE
Omar Cornut setup a wiki of useful widgets for Dear ImGui
- Text Editors
- Node Editors
- Curves, Animations, Gradients
- Plotting, Graph
- File Browsers / File Dialog
- Input Method Editors
- Software Renderer/Rasterizer
- Remoting
- Terminal / Text mode
- Midi/OSC interfacing
- Virtual Reality (VR) / Reprojected UI plane
- Miscellaneous
Notable Releases and Updates
Ministry of Flat 3.5.0 is out
I just released version 3.5.0 Of https://t.co/p03vyl9nuw unwrapper. It has all the new stress detection, flat detection and bevel management in it. It also has a new scaling option for anyone using world space unwrapping.
— Quel Solaar (@quelsolaar) February 5, 2021
OpenColorIO v2 is out
Exciting news for color experts: #OpenColorIO v2 is officially out of beta testing and available for download! https://t.co/CF26KHWDnL
— Academy Software Foundation (@AcademySwf) February 8, 2021
Clang Power Tools are completely free + v7.0 is out in the wild.
Clang Power Tools 7.0 is out now!
— Clang Power Tools (@ClangPowerTools) February 3, 2021
See the full list of features, improvements, and bug fixes.https://t.co/v1UvGPLsxJ #Clang #LLVM #Cpp pic.twitter.com/kXiUBkapsS
FASTBuild v1.04 is out
FASTBuild v1.04 has been released, including:
— Franta Fulin (@FrantaFulin) January 19, 2021
* Performance optimizations for local, distributed and cached builds.
* Profiling and dependency graph visualization tools.
* Bug fixes and improvements.
* Details https://t.co/WingZLGq20
Big thanks to all contributors!
Dear ImGui 1.81 is out!
Dear ImGui 1.81 is out!
— Omar (@ocornut) February 10, 2021
- fixed some tables issues
- simpler freetype integration (+ limited color glyphs support on certain fonts)
- refactored old ListBox helpers
- experimental webgpu renderer
- other additions and fixes (incl docking/viewports fixes)https://t.co/Geql6hsaJu pic.twitter.com/Xq1mflBIpF
Qt 6.0.1 released
#Qt6, the latest major release, has had its first patch release. Qt 6.0.1 includes 200+ bug fixes. If you missed the chance to jump in on day one, now's the perfect opportunity to experience the next generation of #software design and #development! https://t.co/0TPZrh5nZZ#QtDev
— Qt (@qtproject) February 9, 2021
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