The tech giant likes to test and tweak. Stadia promised to change the industry and failed to deliver. From a report: Google’s streaming video game service Stadia had ambitious plans to disrupt the gaming industry, which is dominated by consoles. The tech giant had planned to pack Stadia with original content, announcing two years ago that it was hiring hundreds of…
Tag: game development
Opera Now Has a Game Engine To Go With Its Gamer-Focused Browser
Opera has acquired YoYo Games, a British game development platform best known for GameMaker Studio 2, and is launching its Opera Gaming division. Engadget reports: Opera has bought the company for a simple reason: Opera GX. The gamer-focused web browser was launched in early access back in June 2019. Its headline feature is a slide-out control panel that lets you limit…
Do Games Made Under Crunch Conditions Deserve ‘Best Direction’ Awards?
The annual Game Awards ceremony awarded this year’s “Best Direction” award to Naughty Dog studio’s The Last of Us Part II — provoking a strong reaction from Kotaku’s staff writer. “I think it’s pretty obvious that no game that required its developers to crunch, like The Last of Us Part II did, should be given a Best Direction award.” It’s no…
How C++ Programming Language Became the Invisible Foundation For Everything, and What’s Next
The origins of C++ date back 40 years, yet it remains one of the most widely used programming languages today. TechRepublic spoke to C++ creator, Bjarne Stroustrup, to find out why. An excerpt from the interview: Today, Stroustrup is a Technical Fellow at Morgan Stanley. His work with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for the C++ standard and on the…
Fortnite Remains Banned From Apple’s App Store After Judge Refuses Epic’s Request
Epic Games “did not win its preliminary injunction in its antitrust action against Apple, which would have forced Apple to allow Fortnite back onto the iPhone, iPad, and Mac,” reports BGR, calling it “the decision we warned you about a few weeks ago.” Gonzalez Rogers hinted during the injunction relief hearing a few weeks ago that she wasn’t inclined to side…
‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’ and ‘A Machine For Pigs’ Are Now Open Source
Legendary horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs is now open source, meaning that modders can dig in and see what lies underneath the hood of both games. Polygon reports: The full source code for The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs has been released on Github for folks who want to take a crack at…
Microsoft’s Xbox Expands, Buying ZeniMax Media and Fallout Maker Bethesda For $7.5 Billion
Microsoft’s Xbox team significantly expanded its list of game development studios on Monday, announcing the purchase of ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion in cash. From a report: The entertainment company owns several industry-leading game developers, including Bethesda Softworks, the maker of the post-apocalyptic Fallout games and the fantasy series the Elder Scrolls. It also owns id Software, known for its Doom,…
Can AI Design Games? How Nick Walton Created ‘AI Dungeon’
shirappu writes: Nick Walton created AI Dungeon as an experiment to build an AI dungeon master for D&D games. Since then, it’s grown into a text adventure game in which players can type in anything they want, with the game’s AI responding dynamically [and with over 1.5 million players and multiplayer adventures.] In this interview about the year since its release,…
Gamemakers Inject AI To Develop More Lifelike Characters
moon_unit2 writes: The AI technique that DeepMind used to teach machines to play Atari can now bring new video game characters to life. WIRED reports that researchers at Electronic Arts and the University of British Columbia in Canada developed a reinforcement learning method for animating humanoid characters. The approach feeds on data gathered through motion capture, but then uses reinforcement learning…
Massive Python Survey Reveals Popularity of Linux and PyCharm, Just 10% Still Using Python 2
The Python Software Foundation and JetBrains collected over 24,000 responses for the third annual Python Developer’s Survey. Among its findings: 59% said they used Python for data analysis, “followed by web development at 51%, and machine learning at 40%,” reports ZDNet:
Other major applications of Python include DevOps and system administration (39%), programming web tools like crawlers (37%), software testing (31%), education…