How to recomp XBOX 360 game by rexglue (part 2)
Medium
1 min
Tutorial
rexglue (https://habr.com/ru/articles/1002640/
example project with dolphin https://github.com/rexglue/demo-iruka
Replace with our .xex file (project), then start codegen
Game economy design of Premium games through the example of a 4X strategy on PC
Medium
9 min
Case
Translation
How to design an economy for your game? The answer to this question might require a series of lectures or articles. The fundamental difference in the approach is based, first of all, on monetization model: F2P or B2P. The second thing that defines the approach to developing an economy system is game genre. This article reviews the case of designing the game economy for a B2P (premium) game, which doesn’t involve earning on microtransactions.
Analysis of UE5 Rendering Technology: Nanite
8 min
Tutorial
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.
UE5 Lumen Implementation Analysis
4 min
Tutorial
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:
Unity Performance Optimization Ⅵ: Resource Memory Leak
3 min
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.
The Dino game from Google Chrome using FPGA
4 min
Many people are familiar with the situation when there is no Internet, and a small dinosaur appears on the Google Chrome screen. Today we will tell you how to implement this game on the Cyclone IV FPGA board.
We are Yegor Blinov, Egor Kuziakov, and Inga Ezhova - the first-year students of Innopolis University. In our program, there was a course "Computer Architecture", where we had labs with FPGA boards Cyclone IV and MAX10. We were inspired by this equipment and decided to implement the project on one of the boards.
PVS-Studio to check the RPCS3 emulator
10 min
RPCS3 is an interesting project that emulates the PS3 console. It is actively evolving. Recently we heard the news that the emulator learned how run all the games from the console's catalog. That's a good excuse to analyze the project. We'll see which errors remained after new fixes were added to the project.
Full motion video with digital audio on the classic 8-bit game console
13 min
Back in 2016 an United States based music composer and performer Sergio Elisondo released an one-man band music album A Winner Is You (know your meme), with multi-instrumental cover versions of tunes from numerous memorable classic NES games. A special feature of this release has been its version released in the NES cartridge format that would run on a classic unmodified console and play digitized audio of the full album, instead of the typical chiptune sound you would expect to come from this humble console. I was involved with the software development part of this project.
This year Sergio makes a return with a brand new music release. This time it is all original music album You Are Error, heavily influenced with the video game music aesthetics. It also comes with a special extra. This time we have raised the stakes, and a new NES cartridge release includes not only the digitized audio, but full motion videos for each song, done in the silhouette cutout style similar to the famous Bad Apple video. Yet again, this project is crowdfunded via Kickstarter. It already got the asked amount in a mere 7 hours, but there is still a little time to jump on the bandwagon and get yourself a copy. In the meantime I would like to share an insight on the technical side of both projects.
PVS-Studio searches for bugs in the DuckStation project
8 min
We often check retro games. In our company, many developers like to find interesting projects for themselves. They feel nostalgic when they're studying these projects. But we need to run retro games on something, right? This time we checked a project that helps to run old games on modern hardware.
Female gamers in China
3 min
The latest forecast by Niko Partners shows promise that gender equality in gaming is on track to reach 50/50 by the end of 2020, as figures show a consistent rise of 4% year on year: “Female gamers are rising, making up 42% of total gamers in 2018, 46% in 2019, and forecast to be 50% in 2020, primarily on the mobile platform.” This forecast follows a report by the China Audio-Video and Digital Publishing Association last year that identified growth potential and calls for more quality games targeted at female players.
2019 saw the number of female gamers reach 300 million, contributing RMB 52.7 billion (USD 7.5 billion) or 22.8% of total actual sales revenue of the gaming industry in China. The Association’s report also identified low cost leisure games as most popular among females. Furthermore, the Gamma Data report gives China’s female game market revenue a forecast of RMB 56.8 billion for 2020, with 70% (RMB 40.1 million) of revenue deriving from mobile games.
The Different RPG styles between East and West
6 min
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.
Unicorns break into RTS: analyzing the OpenRA source code
16 min
This article is about the check of the OpenRA project using the static PVS-Studio analyzer. What is OpenRA? It is an open source game engine designed to create real-time strategies. The article describes the analysis process, project features, and warnings that PVS-Studio has issued. And, of course, here we will discuss some features of the analyzer that made the project checking process more comfortable.
Making a demo for NES — HEOHdemo
26 min
There is a lengthy history of computer arts festivals, also known as demo parties, held in Russia over the last quarter century. For decades, once in a while people from all over the country gather together to compete in their ingenuity at getting what was once deemed impossible out of the old or new computer hardware and mere bytes of code. A few leading annual events has been established in the early years. One of them, creatively named CAFe (an acronym for Computer Art FEstival), was held in Kazan from 1999 to 2003. It went under the radar since, making the way for the everlasting Chaos Constructions (1999 — now) and DiHalt (2005 — now). After so long hiatus, the last year CAFe made a loud comeback, returning in full glory — at least by the number of prods released, if not in the scale of the event itself. Presentation of the compo entries went far into the night, with the last demos being shown at 6 AM to the popping eyes of the few hardy ones. There was my demo, too, and this is the story of its making.
The one who resurrected Duke Nukem: interview with Randy Pitchford, magician from Gearbox
38 min
RUVDS and Habr continue the series of interviews with interesting people in IT field. Last time we talked to Richard «Levelord» Gray, level designer of popular games Duke Nukem, American McGee’s Alice, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2, SiN, Serious Sam, author of well-known «You’re not supposed to be here» phrase.
Today we welcome Randall Steward «Randy» Pitchford II, president, CEO and co-founder of Gearbox Software video game development company.
Randy started in 3D Realms where contributed to Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition and Shadow Warrior. Then he founded Gearbox Software and made Half-Life: Opposing Force, which won D.I.C.E in 2000. Other Gearbox titles include Half-Life: Blue Shift, Half-Life: Decay, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, James Bond 007: Nightfire, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Halo: Combat Evolved and of course Borderlands.
The interview team also includes editor of Habr Nikolay Zemlyanskiy, Richard «Levelord» Gray, Randy’s wife Kristy Pitchford and Randy’s son Randy Jr.
Today we welcome Randall Steward «Randy» Pitchford II, president, CEO and co-founder of Gearbox Software video game development company.
Randy started in 3D Realms where contributed to Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition and Shadow Warrior. Then he founded Gearbox Software and made Half-Life: Opposing Force, which won D.I.C.E in 2000. Other Gearbox titles include Half-Life: Blue Shift, Half-Life: Decay, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, James Bond 007: Nightfire, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Halo: Combat Evolved and of course Borderlands.
The interview team also includes editor of Habr Nikolay Zemlyanskiy, Richard «Levelord» Gray, Randy’s wife Kristy Pitchford and Randy’s son Randy Jr.
Making Games for a Living: 11 tips from Levelord
4 min
What is my advice for people who want to become game developers? After 25 years in the industry, I do have some advice to offer.
My Pascal compiler and Polish contemporary art
5 min
Origins
Several years ago I wrote a Pascal compiler. The motivation was simple: as a teenager, I had learnt from my first programming textbooks that a compiler is a very sophisticated thing. This claim eventually became a challenge and required to be tested by experience.
ha.art.pl
First, a simplistic PL/0 compiler came into being, and later an almost fully-functional Pascal compiler for MS-DOS has grown from it. My source of inspiration was the Compiler Construction book by Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the Pascal language. I don't care if Wirth's views are now considered obsolete and have no direct connections to the IT mainstream, or if the compiler design fashion has changed. It is enough to know that his techniques are still simple, elegant, and — last but not least — bring much fun, since it is more appealing to parse a program source with a handwritten recursive descent parser and generate the machine code, rather than to call yaccs, bisons and all their descendants.
My compiler's fate was not so trivial. It has lived two lives: the first one in my own hands, and the second in the hands of computer antiquarians from Poland.
Videogame monsters: how to sow fear
4 min
Tutorial
In video games, enemies are one of the key figures, without which a game might lose its meaning, and when it’s not only enemies, but terrifying monsters, they often create the chilling atmosphere intended by the developers. It’s impossible to imagine Silent Hill without the Pyramid Head, or Outlast without Chris Walker, and so on, you get the idea. Monsters are a cumulative image of a video game enemy, and it’s not necessarily an ugly demon or a giant spider: even an angry neighbor, like in Hello Neighbor, is a monster despite his human appearance.
This is where the reader probably asks:
what’s the point of this article?
$10 million in investments and Wozniak's praise — creating an educational computer for children
14 min
We interviewed Mark Pavluykovskiy — the creator of the Piper educational computer. We asked him about immigrating from Ukraine to the US, how he almost died in Africa, graduated from Princeton, dropped out of a doctorate in Oxford and created a product that deserved a praise from Satia Nadella and Steve Wozniak.
In mid-October the Sistema_VC venture capital fund hosted a conference called Machine Teaching, where creators of various educational startups assembled to talk about technical advancements.
The special guest was Mark Pavluykosvkiy, the creator of Piper. His company created an educational computer — a children’s toy that, using wires, circuit boards and Minecraft teaches programming and engineering to children. A couple of years ago Mark completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, got a couple of Silicon Valley investors on board and raised around $11 million dollars in investments. Now he’s a member of Forbes’ “30 under 30” list, while his project is used by Satia Nadella and Steve Wozniak, among others.
Mark himself is a former Princeton and Oxford student. He was born in Ukraine, but moved to the US with his mother when he was a child. In various interviews Mark claimed that he doesn’t consider himself a genius, but simply someone who got very lucky. A lot of other people aren’t so lucky, however, and he considers it unfair. Driven by this notion, during his junior year he flew to Africa, where he almost died.
In mid-October the Sistema_VC venture capital fund hosted a conference called Machine Teaching, where creators of various educational startups assembled to talk about technical advancements.
The special guest was Mark Pavluykosvkiy, the creator of Piper. His company created an educational computer — a children’s toy that, using wires, circuit boards and Minecraft teaches programming and engineering to children. A couple of years ago Mark completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, got a couple of Silicon Valley investors on board and raised around $11 million dollars in investments. Now he’s a member of Forbes’ “30 under 30” list, while his project is used by Satia Nadella and Steve Wozniak, among others.
Mark himself is a former Princeton and Oxford student. He was born in Ukraine, but moved to the US with his mother when he was a child. In various interviews Mark claimed that he doesn’t consider himself a genius, but simply someone who got very lucky. A lot of other people aren’t so lucky, however, and he considers it unfair. Driven by this notion, during his junior year he flew to Africa, where he almost died.