Game development *

After Epic released the UE5 technology demo at the beginning of 2021, the discussion about UE5 has never stopped. Related technical discussions mainly centered on two new features: global illumination technology Lumen and extremely high model detail technology Nanite. There have been some articles [1 ][2] analyzing Nanite technology in more detail. This article mainly starts from the RenderDoc analysis and source code of UE5, combined with some existing technical data, aims to provide an intuitive and overview understanding of Nanite, and clarify its algorithm principles and design ideas, without involving too many source code level Implementation details.

Lumen is UE5’s GI system, it is different from the traditional real-time GI which only includes the contribution of indirect diffuse reflection. It also includes indirect diffuse reflection and indirect highlight, providing a new set of complete indirect lighting. Lumen supports both hardware-based RTX and software-based Trace algorithms. The starting point of this article is that Lumen GI uses the process, algorithm, and data structure analysis of indirect diffuse reflection part based on software Trace to understand the basic principle and operation mechanism of Lumen from a macro perspective.

The core of Lumen includes the following parts:

Today, we will share some knowledge points related to resource memory leak. A memory leak is the most common issue that we continuously see and also are afraid of. What is the reason behind it? Because we can’t predict the extent of the leak before we locate the leak bottleneck, we had no idea whether it will burst out at a certain moment on the line. We have received feedback from developers that their players had no problem playing for half an hour, but they would get more and more stuck after 3 to 4 hours of playing, which they never expected before. How can it be solved? Today’s sharing will answer such questions.

UWA’s GOT Online-Assets report has a resource occupancy trend chart. If there is a rising trend like the one below, you must pay special attention.

This is the translation of my article about ECS. Original (in Russian).

ECS (Entity Component System) is an architectural pattern used in game development.

In this article, I am going to describe some of the general principles of ECS frameworks' inner workings and some of the problems I have faced during the development of my own.

When I first started learning about ECS everything seemed wonderful, but only in theory. I needed some real practice to make sure that all that they were saying about ECS was true.

I’ve tried different frameworks with different engines and programming languages. Mostly it was the gorgeous EnTT framework that I used with the Godot engine and LeoECS with Unity. I haven’t tried Unity’s native ECS from DOTS because it was rather unpolished at the time I was starting.

After a while, I got enough practical experience with ECS but it was still unclear to me how all this magic works under the hood. There are a few good blogs about ECS development (https://skypjack.github.io/ from the author of EnTT and https://ajmmertens.medium.com/ from the author of Flecs) but none of them gave me enough understanding about how they are implemented. So eventually, following Bender’s example, I decided that I’m gonna make my own ECS =)

The PVS-Studio analyzer often checks code of libraries, frameworks, and engines for game development. Today we check another project — MonoGame, a low-level gamedev framework written in C#.

When I was much younger, I used to play a lot. My number one preference was Knights & Merchants. While all my friends liked battle scenes most, I was fond of economical aspects of this game. For me it was always cool to look after the villagers who run their own business, become hungry sometimes and work together in the name of their country’s welfare. Recently I bought it in Steam store and thought that I could even do a webmake of this game.

As a first step of this dangerous journey it would be cool to take one of the core mechanics and try to re-implement it with the tools I’m already comfortable with: React and WebGL. It’s also a great possibility to test drive Babylon.js, which is in my to-do list.

It's cool when enthusiastic developers create a working clone of a famous game. It's even cooler when people are ready to continue the development of such projects! In this article, we check TheXTech with PVS-Studio. TheXTech is an open implementation of the game from the Super Mario universe.

One of the mechanisms of static analysis is method annotations of popular libraries. Annotations provide more information about functions during errors detecting. CARLA is an impressive open-source project in C++ that helped us implement this mechanism to our analyzer. Subsequently, the simulator became a test-target for the improved PVS-Studio static analyzer.

So, I finally found a moment to write a bit about how we created the water for TReload. Our basic goal was to flood all of the levels with acid - a lot of acid, as the flooded area is massive :) Here’s one of the results which we got out of this process:

PVS-Studio is a static analysis tool that helps find errors in software source code. This time PVS-Studio looked for bugs in Storm Engine's source code.

What this article is about 

In this article, we will talk about multithreading in the backend. 

• how it is implemented 

• how is it used 

• what can be done 

• what we invented ourselves 

All these questions are relevant only if you develop something for the server side - modify the Server SDK code, write your own plugin, or even start some server application from scratch.

The previous year has been very distressing for businesses and employees. Though, software development didn’t get so much affected and is still thriving. While tech expansion is continuing, Java development is also going under significant transformation.

The arrival of new concepts and technologies has imposed a question mark on the potential of Java developers. From wearable applications to AI solutions, Java usage is a matter of concern for peers.

Moreover, it is high time that developers enhance their skills as to the changing demands of the industry. If you are a Java developer, surely you too would be wondering what I am talking about what things you should learn.

Recently we found out that the new version of the fheroes2 project was released. In our company there are many fans of Heroes of Might and Magic game series. So, we couldn't pass it up and checked the project by PVS-Studio.

Hey everyone! I represent a game studio without a name, and the project we’re working on goes by the technical name of "CGDrone". I started writing this article earlier today, having tortured myself for ages with sketches, colours, algorithms and correcting bugs in rotations based on quaternions (the last one just about finished me off). You can probably understand I needed a break.

I’ve often come across stories people have posted online about how they made their game, the difficulties they faced, and the result they achieved at the end. Likewise, our team has its own story, and I’d like to share a bit about it.

Major players in the Chinese app market are joining forces to take on the almighty Google Play store. Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo are reported to launch the Global Developer Service Alliance (GDSA), a platform allowing Android developers to publish their apps in the partnering stores from one upload.

The GDSA is expected to launch in nine countries—including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Spain, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam—although paid app support may vary across the regions. Canalys’ Nicole Peng explains the wide reach of this alliance:

By forming this alliance each company will be looking to leverage the others’ advantages in different regions, with Xiaomi’s strong user base in India, Vivo and Oppo in Southeast Asia, and Huawei in Europe. 

The Chinese Mobile RPG: the Genre of Giants.

Chinese RPGs make up 56% of the top 500 grossing iOS games in China. According to data gathered in 2019 by Game Refinery’s Joel Julkunen. Let’s take a look at the genre and some important points for game developers and RPG enthusiasts to consider Chinese Mobile RPGs.

RPG or role-playing game is a game where the player plays as a character, often the main character, in a fictional game world.

Introduction

Each game has data that game-designers work with. In RPG there is a database of items, in match-3 — the cost in the crystals of tools from the store, in action — hit points, for which medical kit heals.

There are many ways to store such data — someone stores it in tables, in XML or JSON files that edit with their own tools. Unity provides its own way — Scriptable Objects (SO), which I like because you don't have to write your own editor to visualize them, it's easy to make links to the game's assets and to each other, and with Addressables this data can be easily and conveniently stored off-game and updated separately.

In this article I would like to talk about my SODatabase library, with which you can conveniently create, edit and use in the game (edit and serialize) scriptable objects.