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The Toolsmiths

GameDev Tools weekly - Issue 1 — February 14, 2021

Posted on 14 February 2021 by Alexander Pirogov & Victor Stepanov

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



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.



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.

find out more

blizzcon heroes w logo



Applying textures to procedurally generated trees

Interesting approach of extracting texture from photogrammetry of a tree and applying it to procedurally generated trees.



Implementing a font reader from scratch! Easy??

When you want to control every single letter in your game.



Microsoft Visual Studio .props files and Conan

Resolving VS dependencies with .props files and Conan packages



Hot reloading

Example of adding hot reloading to your C++ project using the cr.h library .



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.



Rust foundation started

AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are showing their support for Rust.



USD Working Group Meeting 1-20-21

USD + WebRTC: enabling a shard document state that can be shared between multiple users.

watch video

usd



Unity is updating their undo system

What UX features does your undo system have?



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.

find out more

puffcap3



SDL is moving to GitHub

Even more tools, libraries, and frameworks can be found on GitHub.



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 :’(





The Toolsmiths updates:

  • Immediate mode gui vs retained mode gui discussion in the #gui-toolkits
  • News about Toolsmiths @ GDC 2021 in #general
    • GDC Tools Summit
    • GDC Tools Roundtables:
      • Join us this summer at the virtual Tools Roundtables!
  • We are starting the 3rd season of the Vault Club in our Discord Server.
    • We will be looking at this list of languages and discussing how they apply to Game Tools development:

Join the Toolsmiths Slack to chat about these topics and more!!







Did You Know??

There is a shader IDE

shadered


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



OpenColorIO v2 is out



Clang Power Tools are completely free + v7.0 is out in the wild.

find out more



FASTBuild v1.04 is out



Dear ImGui 1.81 is out!



Qt 6.0.1 released





Did we miss anything?

Send us a tip!

Write a direct message to Alexander Pirogov or Victor Stepanov.