Game Dev Digest — Issue #118 - What's New

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Issue #118 - What's New

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Check out some new features in Unity's latest version, plus lots more. Enjoy!

Feature preview: What's new for multiplayer networking in Unity - We’re happy to share that, as of October 21st, Unity creators have an expanded and supported feature set that accelerates the creation of small-scale cooperative games (like Animal Crossing). These new pre-release packages are now available and are compatible with Unity 2020.3 LTS, Unity 2021.2, and Unity 2022.1 beta. In addition to that, we’ve introduced two new Unity Gaming Services, Relay and Lobby, to keep your players connected for great multiplayer experiences.
Unity

Peeking Into Valorant's Netcode - This article will first explore the design goals we had in mind when building VALORANT’s netcode, and then dive into technical challenges and how we addressed these to align with our design goals.
technology.riotgames.com

Imitation Learning for 2D platformer with Unity ML-Agents - Imitation learning, contrary to Reinforcement Learning, is based on the idea of showing the AI how to fulfill a given task. It’s no longer about asking the agent to find the best possible strategy on his own. As humans we can guide our systems throughout the optimization process of their policies. By doing so they can not only learn faster but also give better results in more complex case scenarios. In this article we are going to look into introducing the concept of Imitation Learning into the training regimes.
pavcreations.com

Experience true Volumetric Clouds with HDRP & Unity 2021.2 - For decades, flat-painted skyboxes and HDRIs have been the go-to solutions for sky and cloud rendering. Now, thanks to the brand-new Volumetric Clouds in HDRP, you can populate your worlds with dynamic clouds. For the first iteration of this system, we focused on performance and ease of use, so you can create beautiful visuals in a couple of clicks for a low GPU cost.
Unity

Videos

The Art of Outer Wilds | Unity Creator Spotlight - Join Unity and Mobius Digital as we explore the solar systems of Outer Wilds one planet at a time! We have the game's art director and an environment / VFX artist break down the principle features of each planet. From giant sand columns, to spherical oceans and destructive supernovas!
Unity

Here's what's new in Unity 2021.2 - Unity 2021.2 feature breakdown.
Christopher Francis - Unity

New Lighting Features in Unity 2021.2: Volumetric Clouds, Lens Flare & Light Anchor | SIGGRAPH 2021 - Get an overview of the brand new Volumetric Clouds system offered by Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), along with some of the alternatives available for generating beautiful skies in Unity, including HDRI distortions and Cloud Layers. You’ll learn about the brand new Lens Flare system, which works with both the Universal Render Pipeline and HDRP and lets you easily simulate the characteristics of camera lenses, and the Light Anchor component, which allows artists to drastically reduce the time needed to light characters and products.
Unity

Unity async / await: Coroutine's Hot Sister [C# & Unity] - The C# async / await workflow can simplify your code and give you more granular control over your game in Unity.
Tarodev

How to Program in Unity: Hierarchical State Machine Refactor [Built-In Character Controller #5] - Learn how to program a Hierarchical State Machine in Unity with this new video break down and tutorial!
iHeartGameDev

Saving and Loading Tilemaps - Unity Tutorial - When you create a level for your game, Unity will save it automatically. But what if there will be changes during runtime or even better, the player creates a big part of the tilemap? Well then you need to save it on your own. But don't worry, creating a basic saving and loading system is quite easy.
Velvary

Assets

Unity Black Friday Sale - Unity's Black Friday sale will begin November 14 and continues through December 4. More than 500 of the very best and most popular assets on the Asset Store will be available for 50% off.

Lightning Deals
New for this sale are Lightning Deals! Each Lightning Deal asset will be available at a deep discount for a limited number of users. During Black Friday, there are 20 licenses available at 90% off, 50 at 80% off, and 400 at 70% off. Once those have been claimed, the asset will no longer be a Lightning Deal, and will remain 50% off through the end of the sale. The following 16 assets will be marked as Lightning Deals at the start of the sale on 11/14/21 21:00:00 PT.

Fluffy Grooming Tool - Fluffy is a complete grooming solution fur and short hair in the Unity Editor. It also supports Alembic hair and fur created in third party applications.
Daniel Zeller Affiliate

Arc Raycast - Arc raycast utility using projectile formulas.
williamrjackson Open Source

Compilation Visualizer for Unity - This tool visualizes the assembly compilation process in Unity3D. It hooks into the Editor-provided events and nicely draws them on a timeline. That's especially helpful when trying to optimize compile times and dependencies between assemblies.
Besides showing a graphical view of compilation, selecting an assembly shows both dependencies and dependents of that assembly.
needle-tools Open Source

RiptideNetworking - C# Networking Library - RUDP (Reliable UDP) networking solution built in C#, primarily intended for use in multiplayer games. Features an unreliable channel (regular UDP) as well as a reliable channel (UDP with loss detection). Works in Unity & console apps alike.
tom-weiland Open Source

Open KCC - This project is a sample of the Open Kinematic Character Controller. A Kinematic Character Controller (KCC) provides a way to control a character avatar as a kinematic object that will interact with the environment.
nicholas-maltbie Open Source

Unity-SpriteAssist - Unity-SpriteAssist is an Unity extension that assist Sprite's mesh creation more conveniently.
Unity 2019.4 or later versions
sr4dev Open Source

Sprite Auditor - Sprite auditor its the tool to give you the visibility when optimizing your atlases for smaller binary size or performance, allowing you see what atlas are reused between multiple scenes, and what sprites are in use from that atlas.
brunomikoski Open Source

Viewseprite - Utility to use Aseprite images as Unity Texture2D in realtime. You can view editing sprites on Unity with shading, lighting and post-processing.
ruccho Open Source

StreamingImageSequence - Streaming Image Sequence is a package for playing sequential image sequences in Unity Timeline easily without making Unity 2D Sprites.
unity3d-jp Open Source

Array2DEditor - Use this if you want to deal with 2D arrays easily within the inspector of Unity.
Eldoir Open Source

DemiLib - Various utility libraries for Unity (alpha). Developed by Daniele Giardini (DOTween).
Demigiant Open Source

NativePhysicsBVH - A Bounding Volume Hierarchy with basic physics queries for Unity DOTS.
marijnz Open Source

dotsnav - DotsNav is a fully dynamic and robust planar navmesh Unity package built on DOTS. It is fast enough to add and remove many obstacles each frame, supports agents of any size, and can be used through monobehaviours without prior knowledge of DOTS.
dotsnav Open Source

CubeCoordinates - Unity package providing a cube coordinate system and methods for building hexagonal tile grids for interactive gameplay.
owenmoore Open Source

Light Cookies - Download these files and drag them into an #HDRP project, and get instantly more realistic lights adding these ies cookies to your lights.
Mathieu @the_f_key

PrefabOnlyAttribute.cs - An attribute that allows referencing only prefabs in the editor.
PhantasmicDev Open Source

Spotlight

Breaking Box - Breaking Box is a 3D multiplayer game with a level editor in-game. You can enjoy the competition with friends or create your own levels!
[Play the demo on Steam, support the upcoming Kickstarter, and follow along on Twitter]
Dotoyou Games

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