Games and game consoles

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Origins

This is where the reader probably asks:

Set-Up Players