Game Console Dev Guide

A guide covering Game Console Development including the applications, libraries and tools that will make you a better and more efficient Game Console Developer.

Note: You can easily convert this markdown file to a PDF in VSCode using this handy extension Markdown PDF.

Getting Started with Game Consoles

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YouTube Tutorials

Xbox Development

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Quick links to Development Resources

Xbox Series X

Xbox Series S

Playstation Development

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Quick links to Development Resources

PlayStation 5

PlayStation 4

PlayStation® VR Headset is a virtual reality headset developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It gives the user an amazing gaming experience with stunning High Dynamic Range visuals and up to 120fps, as two 1920 x 1080 OLED displays deliver a vast 100º field of view. PSVR is fully functional with the PlayStation 4™ and is forward compatible with the PlayStation 5™ home video game console.

PlayStation VR Headset. Source: PlayStation

PlayStation®VR2 is the next generation of virtual reality gaming by PlayStation. It gives the user an amazing gaming experience with new stunning 4K High Dynamic Range visuals and up to 120fps, as two 2000 x 2040 OLED displays deliver over four times the resolution generated by the original PlayStation®VR headset. A vast 110º field of view and a light, well-balanced Fresnel lens. The lens adjustment dial allows you to customize spacing between lenses to match your eye position for an optimal onscreen image. Along with ground-breaking new controllers and genre-defining games, all made possible by the power of PS5™.

PlayStation VR 2 Headset. Source: PlayStation

Nintendo Switch Development

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Quick links to Development Resources

Nintendo Switch

Steam Deck Development

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Quick links to Development Resources

Steam Deck

Steamworks is a free suite of tools available to any developer to use in their game or software on Steam and the Steam Deck.

Steam Hardware GitLab Repo is a repository that contains CAD files for the external shell (surface topology) of Steam Deck, under a Creative Commons license. This includes an STP model, STL model, and drawings (DWG) for reference.

Dynamic Cloud Sync is a tool that Steam will use to automatically upload all modified save game data to the cloud prior to the device entering sleep mode. Users can then resume their game on any PC, laptop or other device. Steam will also automatically download any save game changes when users return to their Steam Deck and wake up the device.

Steam Cloud is a tool that provides an easy and transparent remote file storage system for your game. Files specified in the Auto-Cloud configuration or written to disk (created, modified, deleted, etc.) using the Cloud API will automatically be replicated to the Steam servers after the game exits. If the user changes computers, the files are automatically downloaded to the new computer prior to the game launching. The game can then access the files by reading them through the Cloud API or reading them directly from disk as usual. Avoid machine specific configurations such as video settings.

Gamescope is a SteamOS session micro-compositing window manager formerly known as steamcompmgr.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is an open source, high-quality solution for producing high resolution frames from lower resolution inputs. FSR enables “practical performance” for costly render operations, such as hardware ray tracing for the AMD RDNA™ and AMD RDNA™ 2 architectures.

MangoHud is a Vulkan and OpenGL overlay for monitoring FPS, temperatures, CPU/GPU load and more.

GOverlay is an open source project aimed to create a Graphical UI to manage Vulkan/OpenGL overlays. It is still in early development.

ReplaySorcery is an open-source, instant-replay solution for Linux.

Deck Verified is a program that reviews games in Steam's catalog verifying their compatibility with the Steam Deck. So when you visit your Library on Steam Deck, you’ll find a compatibility badge on each title, reflecting the kind of experience you can expect when playing each game on Steam Deck.

Development on Apple Silicon

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Note: Learn more about Apple Silicon here

Quick Links to Developer Resources

Tools and Frameworks

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Reality Composer Pro is a tool that let's you discover how to easily compose, edit, and preview 3D content with Reality Composer Pro. Follow along as you explore this developer tool by setting up a new project, composing scenes, adding particle emitters and audio, and even previewing content on your device.
Reality Composer is a powerful tool that makes it easy for you to create interactive augmented reality experiences with no prior 3D experience. The Reality Converter quickly converts your existing 3D models to USDZ so it works seamlessly in our tools and on all AR-enabled iPhone and iPad devices.
Apple Vision is a framework that performs face and face landmark detection, text detection, barcode recognition, image registration, and general feature tracking. Vision also allows the use of custom Core ML models for tasks like classification or object detection.
Metal shader converter is a tool that converts shader intermediate representations in LLVM IR bytecode into bytecode suitable to be loaded into Metal. It’s available as a library and a standalone executable. All the functionality exposed through the library interface is available via the standalone executable.
USDZ is a file format that contains a 3D scene or object saved in the USDZ Universal format, which is developed by Apple and Pixar Animation Studios. It is an uncompressed and unencrypted .ZIP archive that stores a Universal Scene Description (.USD, USDA, or USDC) file, which includes 3D geometry and shading data. USDZ files may also contain .PNG and .JPEG image textures and .M4A, .MP3, or .WAV audio files utilized in the 3D object or scene.
ARKit is a set set of software development tools to enable developers to build augmented-reality apps for iOS developed by Apple. The latest version ARKit 3.5 takes advantage of the new LiDAR Scanner and depth sensing system on iPad Pro(2020) to support a new generation of AR apps that use Scene Geometry for enhanced scene understanding and object occlusion.
RealityKit is a framework to implement high-performance 3D simulation and rendering with information provided by the ARKit framework to seamlessly integrate virtual objects into the real world.
RealityUI is a Swift Package for creating familiar UI Elements and animations in a RealityKit rendered Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality scene.
SceneKit is a high-level 3D graphics framework that helps you create 3D animated scenes and effects in your iOS apps.
SwiftUI is a user interface toolkit that provides views, controls, and layout structures for declaring your app's user interface. The SwiftUI framework provides event handlers for delivering taps, gestures, and other types of input to your application.
UIKit is a framework provides the required infrastructure for your iOS or tvOS apps. It provides the window and view architecture for implementing your interface, the event handling infrastructure for delivering Multi-Touch and other types of input to your app, and the main run loop needed to manage interactions among the user, the system, and your app.
SpriteKit is a general-purpose framework for drawing shapes, particles, text, images, and video in two dimensions. It leverages Metal to achieve high-performance rendering, while offering a simple programming interface to make it easy to create games and other graphics-intensive apps.
MetalFX is a new API that provides platform optimized graphics effects for Metal applications. With MetalFX Upscaling, your application can now render frames at a lower resolution, reducing rendering time, without compromising rendering quality. We'll also show you how and when to use its two effects: spatial upscaling, which delivers substantial performance gains, and temporal AA and upscaling, which delivers the highest quality rendering.

MetalFX Rendering. Image Credit: Apple

Apple Core Animation Framework is a graphics rendering and animation infrastructure that provides high frame rates and smooth animations without burdening the CPU and slowing down your app.
Apple Core Graphics Framework is a framework based on the Quartz advanced drawing engine. It provides low-level, lightweight 2D rendering with unmatched output fidelity.
GPUImage3 is the third generation of the GPUImage framework, an open source project for performing GPU-accelerated image and video processing on Mac and iOS. This third generation is redesigned to use Apple's Metal in place of OpenGL.

Game Porting Toolkit

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Game Porting Toolkit is Apple's new translation layer which combines Wine with Apple's own D3DMetal which supports DirectX 9 through 12. Games that use anti-cheat(Easy Anti-Cheat and BattleEye) or aggressive DRM generally don't work. Games that require AVX/AVX 2 CPUs also don't work.

The Game Porting Toolkit builds a dxil to metallib converter and DirectX11/DirectX12 to Metal runtime translator. Non-graphics APIs are translated by Wine and do not use any tech from moltenVK, DXVK; or SPIRV-Cross. The Metal shader converter can be shipped by games and can be used in the game developer asset pipelines.
Metal shader converter is a tool that converts shader intermediate representations in LLVM IR bytecode into bytecode suitable to be loaded into Metal. It’s available as a library and a standalone executable. All the functionality exposed through the library interface is available via the standalone executable.

Working Games:

ALL WORKING GAMES LIST (Game Porting Toolkit = Windows DX12 Latest Games for Apple Silicon)
Cyberpunk 2077
Elden Ring
Diablo IV
Hogwarts Legacy
Crysis Remastered
Cuphead
Halo 3 (No Online due to Easy Anti-Cheat Compatibility)
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (~50 FPS on High settings at 1080p with M1 Pro.)
God of War (Works somewhat well on M1 Pro (16gb), wouldn't recommend lesser hardware.)
Deep Rock Galactic
Sonic Omens
Sonic P-06
Scarlet Nexus
Dyson Sphere Program (some objects and main character weren't visible before)
Derail Valley (good performance, no missing manuals, and in-game objects for train operation like on CrossOver)
Spider-Man (2018)
Spider-Man Miles Morales - requires Windows version fix.
Warframe - To get installer/launcher working add dwrite (disabled) to library overrides in winecfg.
QUBE 2
Deceive Inc. - works well if launched without EAC.
Risk of Rain 2 (does not require -disable-gpu-skinning like Crossover 22.)
Tetris Effect: (Connected - Game window doesn't like retina mode, works otherwise.)
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

System Requirements

macOS Sonoma should be used, currently it is in beta.
macOS Ventura causes large numbers of issues with steamwebhelper.exe crashing so it isn't recommended, use the macOS Sonoma beta.
Visit Apple Developer Downloads site, these files are now free to download use for any logged in Apple account.
- Search for Command Line Tools for Xcode 15 beta and download the dmg file, then install it.
- If you have an old version Xcode installed, remove it.
- Search for Game Porting Toolkit and download it. Open the dmg file and then run the pkg.

Using Homebrew

Note: if you have ever installed Homebrew before, then it is advisable to remove arm64 Homebrew as this can interfere with this build process. Either use a Homebrew uninstall script or delete the folder /opt/homebrew/bin.

Open Terminal (search in Spotlight on macOS).

Install Rosetta:

softwareupdate --install-rosetta

Enter an x86_64 shell to continue the following steps in a Rosetta environment. All subsequent commands should be run within this shell.

arch -x86_64 zsh

Install the x86_64 version of Homebrew if you don't already have it.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Make sure the brew command is on your path:

which brew

If this command does not print /usr/local/bin/brew, you should use this command:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:${PATH}

Build

Run this command to download Apple tap:

brew tap apple/apple http://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple

Install the game-porting-toolkit formula. This formula downloads and compiles several large software projects. How long this takes will depend on the speed of your computer. It can take over 1 hour to complete depending on the speed of your Mac.

brew -v install apple/apple/game-porting-toolkit

If during installation you see an error such as “Error: game-porting-toolkit: unknown or unsupported macOS version: :dunno”, your version of Homebrew doesn’t have macOS Sonoma support. Update to the latest version of Homebrew and try again.

brew update brew -v install apple/apple/game-porting-toolkit

Wine prefix

A Wine prefix contains a virtual C: drive. You will install the toolkit and your game into this virtual C: drive. Run the following command to create a new Wine prefix named my-game-prefix in your home directory.

WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 winecfg

A “Wine configuration” window should appear on your screen.
Change the version of Windows to Windows 10.
Choose Apply and then OK to exit winecfg.

If the “Wine configuration” window does not appear, and no new icon appears in the Dock, verify that you have correctly installed the x86_64 version of Homebrew as well as the game-porting-toolkit formula.

Preparing the toolkit

Make sure the Game Porting Toolkit dmg downloaded earlier is mounted at /Volumes/Game Porting Toolkit-1.0. Use this script to copy the Game Porting Toolkit library directory into Wine’s library directory.

ditto /Volumes/Game\ Porting\ Toolkit-1.0/lib/ `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/lib/

Put the 3 scripts from the Game Porting Toolkit DMG into here /usr/local/bin using this command:

cp /Volumes/Game\ Porting\ Toolkit*/gameportingtoolkit* /usr/local/bin

Steam install

Go to Steam website and download the Windows version of Steam and place in your Downloads folder.

Install Steam

gameportingtoolkit ~/my-game-prefix ~/Downloads/SteamSetup.exe

Run Steam

gameportingtoolkit ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files (x86)/Steam/steam.exe'

Log into Steam A common issue is that Steam will present with a blank black window.

Alternate way of launching Steam (after installing):

MTL_HUD_ENABLED=1 WINEESYNC=1 WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix /usr/local/Cellar/game-porting-toolkit/1.0/bin/wine64 'C:\Program Files (x86)/Steam/steam.exe'

If this continues then close the Terminal window and then re-open and try again, repeat until the login screen opens. Now you should be able to download and launch Windows games through Steam.

Epic/Heroic Games and GOG support

This is particularly useful because as it currently, the real Epic Games Launcher fails to install under the Game Porting Toolkit. Heroic supports Epic and GOG.com games.

Install the native macOS Heroic Games Launcher or from Homebrew.
Open Heroic, and log into your Epic Games and/or GOG.com account.
Go to the "Wine Manager" and install a numbered version of Wine, such that it won't auto update- we are going to modify it.
At the time of writing this, the newest numbered version of Wine-Crossover is Wine-Crossover-Wine-22.1.0
Press the folder icon that appears after installing it to open the directory containing Heroic's Wine installations.
Right-click on the version of Wine you just installed and press "Show Package Contents".
Open this directory in the Terminal.
- If you have "OpenInTerminal" this is one button, otherwise press "Show Path Bar" and navigate where it says with "cd".
- It should be something like cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/heroic/tools/wine/Wine-crossover-wine-22.1.0.

cd Contents/MacOS

Remove the existing Wine:

rm wine

Create a symlink to Game Porting Toolkit's Wine

If using Game Porting Toolkit Wineprefix:

ln -s `/usr/local/bin/brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 wine

If using Whisky:

ln -s /Applications/Whisky.app/Contents/Resources/Libraries/Wine/bin/wine64 wine

cd ../Resources

Remove the existing Wine:

rm -rfv wine

Create a symlink to Game Porting Toolkit's Wine

If using Game Porting Toolkit Wineprefix:

ln -s `/usr/local/bin/brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit` wine

If using Whisky:

ln -s /Applications/Whisky.app/Contents/Resources/Libraries/Wine wine

You are now done with Terminal. Install any games you want to try playing.
Select the game you want to play, and press the settings button in the top-right.
Make sure the version of Wine you just downloaded and modified is selected.
Make sure your Game Porting Toolkit Wine Prefix is selected. If you followed Apple's guide this is /Users/you/my-game-prefix.
If you Open the "Other" section you can also add any environment variables you want like WINEESYNC=1" and "MTL_HUD_ENABLED=1"
Close the settings and try running the game.

Battle.net

Please download the Windows version of Battle.net.

Make a new Wineprefix for Battle.net - we will refer to this as battle-net from now:

WINEPREFIX=~/battle-net `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 winecfg

A “Wine configuration” window should appear on your screen.
Change the version of Windows to Windows 10.
Choose Apply and then OK to exit winecfg.

Run Battle.net launcher

gameportingtoolkit ~/battle-net ~/Downloads/Battle.net-Setup.exe

Please be aware that there is an issue launching Battle.net once installed, the only current way to re-login is to 'install' the launcher again.

Start individual game without the launcher using this command:

arch -x86_64 gameportingtoolkit-no-hud ~/battle-net 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Diablo IV\Diablo IV Launcher.exe'

Launching individual game

Open your Wine prefix’s virtual C: drive in Finder (open ~/my-game-prefix/drive_c) and copy your game into an appropriate subdirectory.

A. Standard launching

gameportingtoolkit ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files\MyGame\MyGame.exe'

This launches the given Windows game binary with a visible extended Metal Performance HUD and filters logging to output from the Game Porting Toolkit.

B. Launching without a HUD

gameportingtoolkit-no-hud ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files\MyGame\MyGame.exe'

C. Launching with Wine ESYNC disable

gameportingtoolkit-no-esync ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files\MyGame\MyGame.exe'

Logging

The provided bin/gameportingtoolkit* scripts can be copied onto your path to facilitate different forms of logging and launching. You can run these scripts from any shell; you don’t need to switch to the Rosetta environment first.

Logging output will appear in the Terminal window in which you launch your game as well as the system log, which can be viewed with the Console app found in Applications ▸ Utilities. Log messages from the Game Porting Toolkit are prefixed with D3DM. By default the gameportingtoolkit* scripts will filter to just the D3DM-prefixed messages. Troubleshooting • Link

Steam login black screen

Close the Terminal window and then reopen and retry the command, repeat several times.

Alternate way of launching Steam (after installing):

MTL_HUD_ENABLED=1 WINEESYNC=1 WINEPREFIX=<path to the Wine bottle you set up> /usr/local/Cellar/game-porting-toolkit/1.0/bin/wine64 'C:\Program Files (x86)/Steam/steam.exe'

If still not working then try using CrossOver and create a Steam bottle, then redirect this WINEPREFIX to that bottle:

WINEPREFIX="/Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/CrossOver/Bottles/Steam/"

Steam crashes straight after opening: Disconnect any external monitors.

Battle.net launcher won't re-launch: Re-install the launcher to reopen, no other fix at the moment.

Game won’t run because it thinks the version of Windows is too old. Some games detect specific minimum versions of Windows and need to be updated. Use this script to update your wineprefix with build 19042 which should work for most games e.g. Spider-Man Remastered.

WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 reg add 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion' /v CurrentBuild /t REG_SZ /d 19042 /f

WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 reg add 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion' /v CurrentBuildNumber /t REG_SZ /d 19042 /f

WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wineserver -k

steamwebhelper.exe crashes

This is caused by Steam being run through macOS Ventura or below, upgrade to macOS Sonoma.

Game won't run and crashes with an invalid instruction

Invalid instruction crashes are often (but not always) caused when Rosetta 2 is unable to translate AVX/AVX2 instructions. You may be able to recompile a version of your game without AVX/AVX2 instructions in order to evaluate its potential on Apple Silicon with the Game Porting Toolkit when you hit this error. When porting your code natively to Apple Silicon, NEON instructions are a high-performance replacement for AVX/AVX2.

Game won't run because its anti-cheat or DRM software is incompatible with Wine translation.

You may be able to rebuild a custom version of your game in your Windows development environment with anti-cheat or DRM disabled for your own evaluation purposes. When porting your code natively to Apple Silicon and macOS, contact your anti-cheat or DRM provider—most have native Apple Silicon solutions for your native build.

Game won’t run because it requires Mono, .NET, or the MSVCRT runtime.

The game porting toolkit’s evaluation environment does not pre-install these runtime support packages. If your game makes use of one of these packages, consider searching for and downloading appropriate installers (.exe or .msi) and installing them to your evaluation environment. Additional runtime installers can be run on your environment by just launching the installer and following its installation instructions:

WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 <some-installer.exe>

And .MSI packages can be installed by launching the Windows uninstaller application and choosing to install a downloaded .msi package:

WINEPREFIX=~/my-game-prefix `brew --prefix game-porting-toolkit`/bin/wine64 uninstaller

Controller issues

Issues may be fixed by enrolling into the Steam beta.

Apple AR and Vision Pro Headset

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Important Terms to Know

Augmented Reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information.
Virtual Reality (VR) is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world. The applications of virtual reality include entertainment (video games), education (medical or military training) and business (virtual meetings).
Mixed Reality (MR) is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations, where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time.
Extended Reality (XR) is a concept referring to all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearables. Including augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR).

Vision Pro Headset. Image Credit: Apple

Vision Pro Headset with battery pack. Image Credit: Apple

R1 & M2 chips in the Vision Pro Headset. Image Credit: Apple

visionOS. Image Credit: Apple

visionOS is Apple's iOS-like operating system for their upcoming AR/VR (Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality) headset powered by Apple's Silicon M2 and R1 chips. It will have an App Store with apps that include mixed-reality versions of their core Apple apps like Messages, FaceTime, Maps, and AR/VR games from Apple Arcade. Along with features such as Memojis and SharePlay that could be central to the user experience.

visionOS Resources

Apple Vision Pro Headset Specs:

Powered by an M2 chip and R1 chip(dedicated toward real-time sensor processing for the 12 cameras and 5 sensors on the Vision Pro headset).
High-resolution 4K micro OLED displays.
Display refresh rate of 90Hz and supports a special 96Hz mode for 24fps video.
Display Pixel Size will be between 3000 ppi-4000 ppi.
Display offers a brightness of 5,000 nits.
The color gamut is quoted as DCI > 97% DCI.
96W USB-C power adapter.
A USB-C port for data transfer.
A proprietary magnetic port(MagSafe) to attach the battery pack.
Expected battery life of about 2 hours per pack.
12 optical cameras and 5 sensors for tracking movements, mapping the environment, and projecting visual experiences.
WiFi 6E, which adds 6GHz spectrum to the 2.4GHz & 5GHz bands for increased bandwidth and less device interference.

OLEDoS (OLED on Silicon) is a display panel that typically has a diagonal length of less than 1 inch and meets the 3000 ppi-4000 ppi resolution criteria of AR/VR device displays. Existing OLED displays use Low-Temperature-Poly-Silicon (LTPS) or Oxide TFT based on glass substrates. OLEDoS uses silicon-wafer-based CMOS substrates. Using silicon substrates, ultra-fine circuit structures typically used in semiconductor processes can be reproduced, which in turn lead to the creation of ultra-high-resolution OLEDs when organic matter is deposited on them.

LG and Sony OLEDoS Display Specs:

High-resolution 4K micro OLED displays.
Display Pixel Size will be between 3000 ppi-4000 ppi.
Display offers a brightness of 5,000 nits.
The color gamut is quoted as DCI > 97% DCI.

LG OLEDoS

OLEDoS: Solution for ultra-high resolution

Credit: LG

Sony OLEDoS

Specs for OLED and OLEDoS

Credit: Sony

Unreal Engine Development

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Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games with the world's most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool. Continuously evolving to serve not only its original purpose as a state-of-the-art game engine, today it gives creators across industries the freedom and control to deliver cutting-edge content, interactive experiences, and immersive virtual worlds.

Unreal Engine 5 with Big City Sample Project

Unreal Engine Twinmotion. Source: Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine 5 Project browser

Unreal Engine 5 Vehicle Project Demo

Unreal Engine Marketplace

Unreal Engine Tools

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Blueprint Visual Scripting is a complete gameplay scripting system in Unreal Engine based on the concept of using a node-based interface to create gameplay elements from within Unreal Editor. As with many common scripting languages, it is used to define object-oriented (OO) classes or objects in the engine.

Blueprint Visual Scripting UI

Datasmith is a collection of tools and plugins that bring entire pre-constructed scenes and complex assets created in a variety of industry-standard design applications into Unreal Engine.

Chaos Physics is a Beta feature that is the light-weight physics simulation solution used in Fortnite, and it includes the following major features.

RBAN (Rigid Body Animation Nodes)
Destruction
Cloth
Ragdoll
Vehicles

Niagara VFX System is one of two tools you can use to create and adjust visual effects (VFX) inside Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). Before Niagara, the primary way to create and edit visual effects in UE4 was to use Cascade. It has many of the same of particle manipulation methods that Cascade offers, the way you interact and build visual effects with Niagara is vastly different.

MetaHuman Creator is a free cloud-based app that empowers anyone to create photorealistic digital humans, complete with hair and clothing, in minutes. MetaHumans come fully rigged and ready to animate in your Unreal Engine projects.

Twinmotion is a real-time 3D immersion software that produces high-quality images, panoramas and standard or 360° VR videos in seconds. Developed for architecture, construction, urban planning and landscaping professionals.

Bridgew by Quixel is a gateway to create a world of 3D content right inside the Unreal Engine. it includes Megascans—the world's largest library of AAA, cinema-quality assets based on real-world scan data.

Lumen is an Unreal Engine 5 feature that uses multiple ray tracing methods to solve Global Illumination and Reflections. Screen traces are done first, followed by a more reliable method. It uses Software Ray Tracing through Signed Distance Fields by default, but can achieve higher quality on supporting video cards when Hardware Ray Tracing is enabled.

Nanite is Unreal Engine 5's new virtualized geometry system which uses a new internal mesh format and rendering technology to render pixel scale detail and high object counts. It intelligently does work on only the detail that can be perceived and no more.

Procedural Content Generation Framework (PCG) is a toolset for creating your own procedural content inside Unreal Engine. It provides artists and designers the ability to build fast, iterative tools and content of any complexity ranging from asset utilities, such as buildings or biome generation, up to entire worlds.

Unreal Engine's VCam system is a Cine Camera in Unreal Engine that uses a modular component system to manipulate camera data and output the final results to a variety of external output devices. In addition, the Virtual Camera system provides its functionality while in the editor and during Play In Editor (PIE) or Standalone Game mode.

PolyEd (PolyGroup Edit) is a tool that includes a suite of operations for editing a mesh with PolyGroups. Common operations such as Extrude, Bevel, Weld, and Bridge are available. Also included are operations that only work with structured PolyGroups, such as Insert Edge Loop and edge loop/ring selection.

PolyDef is a tool that dynamically alters the shape of a mesh through its PolyGroups. Deformation is an efficient way to reshape a mesh quickly and create organic geometry.

nDisplay is a tool in Unreal Engine that describes how multiple computers work together in an nDisplay rendering network.

Unreal Engine Marketplace is Unreal Engine's Store that has a library Of Textures, Models, Animations, Tutorials, and More for creating amazing 3D projects and games.

UnrealBuildTool (UBT) is a tool that manages the process of building UE4 source code across a variety of build configurations.

UnrealHeaderTool (UHT) is a custom parsing and code-generation tool supporting the UObject system.

AutomationTool is a generic system used to automate processes, including testing and building games.

Proxy Geometry Tool is a tool-set that was developed as a way to increase your Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) project's performance while keeping the visual quality of your project uneffected.

Quixel Megascans is a massive online scan library of high-resolution, consistent PBR calibrated surface, vegetation and 3D scans, also including desktop applications for managing, mixing and exporting your downloaded scan data.

Replay System is a tool which can record gameplay for later viewing. This feature is available in all games, from live, multiplayer games played on dedicated servers, to single-player games, and even including Play-In-Editor sessions. At a high level, the Replay system works by using a DemoNetDriver to read data drawn from the built-in replication system, similar to how a NetDriver operates in a live, networked gameplay environment.

Take Recorder is a tool that enables the fast iteration of recording performances and quickly reviewing previous takes for virtual production workflows. You can easily record animations from motion capture linked to characters in the level, as well as actual Live Link data for future playback.

Cesium for Unreal is a tool that brings the 3D geospatial ecosystem to Unreal Engine. By combining a high-accuracy full-scale WGS84 globe, open APIs and open standards for spatial indexing such as 3D Tiles, and cloud-based real-world content from Cesium ion with Unreal Engine, this project enables a new era of 3D geospatial software.

Unreal Engine Live-streaming Toolkit is a Live-streaming Toolkit for video, alpha and audio (Viewport, Cinecam, 360 Camera) via RTMP/ RTSP/ SRT/ NDI/ Spout/ Virtual Webcam plus direct display and window capture. Available in Unreal Marketplace

HttpGPT is an Unreal Engine 5 plugin that facilitates integration with OpenAI's GPT based services (ChatGPT and DALL-E) through asynchronous REST requests, making it easy for developers to communicate with these services. It also includes Editor Tools to integrate Chat GPT and DALL-E image generation directly in the Engine.

Substance 3D is a plugin that enables the use of Substance materials directly in Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Engine 4. Whether you are working on games, visualization and or deploying across mobile, desktop, or XR, Substance delivers a unique experience with optimized features for enhanced productivity. The runtime currently works for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Substance 3D

Image Credit: Adobe

Unreal Engine Learning Resources

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Unity Development

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Unity is a cross-platform game development platform. Unity can be used to build high-quality 3D and 2D games, deploy them across mobile, desktop, VR/AR, consoles or the Web, and connect with loyal and enthusiastic players and customers. Checkout the Unity Manual to get started on your Unity projects.

Unity Terrain project. Source: Unity

Unity Hub Installs

Unity Asset Store

Unity Tools

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Unity Hub is a tool that helps manage multiple installations of the Unity Editor, create new projects, and access your work.

Unity Asset Storeis Unity's Store that has a library Of Textures, Models, Animations, Tutorials, and More for creating amazing 3D projects and games.

Unity Plus is a version of Unity for small businesses and serious hobbyists get more functionality and training resources to power up their projects.

Unity Pro is a version of Unity to create and operate amazing applications and immersive experiences with a complete solution for professionals across industries.

Unity Enterprise is a version of Unity for large teams creating at scale, Unity Enterprise delivers comprehensive technology, resources, and support that fuel innovation, reduce risk, and power your success.

Unity XR is a plug-in framework that enables XR providers to integrate with the Unity engine and make full use of its features.

Unity MARS is a tool that helps you create augmented reality (AR) apps with better workflows and purpose built authoring tools.

Unity Build Server is a tool that offloads your Unity project builds to network hardware, empowering your creative team to iterate more, produce higher quality products, and ship on time.

Unity Teams is a tool that helps you and your team create together, faster. It makes it simple to save, share and sync your Unity projects with anyone.

Unity Automated QA is a tool that shortens the development feedback loop with on-demand tests that anyone on your team can create and run without writing code.

Unity Simulation Pro is a tool that unlocks the true power of scalable simulations through a simulation-optimized version of the Unity runtime.

Unity Forma is a tool that brings the power of real-time 3D to your marketing. It turns 3D product data into interactive 3D configurators, stunning images and more.

Unity Reflect is a tool that helps create an experience immersive and collaborative real-time 3D environments, including in AR and VR, for better decision-making across your entire project lifecycle.

Unity Reflect Develop is a tool that builds your own custom applications to address any problem across the entire building and infrastructure lifecycle for internal or commercial deployment.

Unity ArtEngine is Unity’s material authoring tool. Harnessing the power of assisted creation, the tool helps creators accelerate production pipelines.

Unity Machine Learning Agents is a tol that helps train and embed intelligent agents by leveraging state-of-the-art deep learning technology.

Unity Essential Success is a tool that is your dedicated Support Coordinator and experienced Unity engineers are ready to help.

Bolt Visual scripting is a tool in Unity empowers creators to develop gameplay mechanics or interaction logic with a visual, graph-based system, instead of writing traditional lines of code.

VisualLive is a tool for construction professionals can visualize designs and collaborate in real-time by overlaying large BIM and CAD files onto jobsites using AR.

Professional Services: Optimization Accelerator is atool that boosts your project and your productivity in a four-day sprint with hands-on guidance from a Unity engineer. It will help you analyze performance problems, test solutions, and implement improvements.

Odin Inspector Enterprise is a tool that optimizes your project workflows and save thousands of development hours.

Multiplay is a resilient, multicloud hybrid server hosting and matchmaking platform without having to build and maintain your own infrastructure. Proven at scale in some of the world’s biggest games.

Vivox is a voice and text comms tool that boosts player engagement, retention rates and create immersive multiplayer experiences by leveraging an easy-to-implement, feature-rich voice and text chat service.

Relayᴮᴱᵀᴬ is a tool that provides a great multiplayer gaming experiences with Unity’s Relay service that's now in open beta.

Lobbyᴮᴱᵀᴬ is a tool that connects your players for great multiplayer gaming experiences with Lobby that's now in Open Beta.

Cloud Codeᴮᴱᵀᴬ is a tool that runs your game logic in the cloud as serverless functions and interact with other backend services.

Cloud Saveᴮᴱᵀᴬ is a tool that builds better player experiences by storing game data to the cloud.

Furioos is a tool that streams fully interactive 3D experiences from Unity, other real-time 3D platforms, and Windows applications with peak visual quality in any web browser.

OctaneRender® for Unity is a tool that lets you harness physically accurate rendering directly in Unity and compose gorgeous, cinematic-quality scenes with OctaneRender materials and lighting.

Pacelab WEAVR is a tool that provides a complete XR platform that enables any company, in any industry, to develop and manage enterprise-scale immersive training.

Interact is a tool that creates advanced real-time, human-centric simulations on any VR configuration for training, visualization, and safety.

Prespective is a tool that helps you design and simulate your machine, factory, or system in Unity real-time 3D. Create common ground among stakeholders and speed up decision processes with improved visualization tools.

Pixyz is a tool that lets you can quickly import, prep, and optimize your large CAD, mesh and point cloud models for real-time visualizations in Unity.

Plastic SCM Cloud Edition is a tool that makes Collaboration more efficient with a performant, easy-to-use version control system (VCS) made for programmers, artists and designers.

Backtrace is a game crash management platform that delivers uninterrupted game experiences by automating your response to errors.

SpeedTree® is a group of vegetation programming and modeling software products developed and sold by Interactive Data Visualization, Inc. that generates virtual foliage for animations, architecture and in real time for video games and demanding real time simulations. Unity Technologies acquired SpeedTree in July 2021.

ParSec is a the ultimate remote desktop, powerful enough for teams of developers, designers, architects, and engineers to get the job done and work together from anywhere. Unity Technologies acquired Parsec in August 2021.

SyncSketch is a collaboration software for visual artists that allows a team to view, review, and provide feedback on each other’s work. It includes support for both 2D and 3D assets as well as video. As of December 2021 SyncSketch has been acquired by Unity Technologies.

Weta Digital is a digital visual effects company created by Peter Jackson. It produced the digital special effects for Heavenly Creatures and the Lord of the Rings. Unity Technologies acquired Weta Digital in November 2021.

Unity Learning Resources

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Unity Knowledge Base is a library of articles that helps you troubleshoot common problems, whether it’s creating an account, importing assets, or baking a scene.
Unity Forum
Unity Issue Tracker
Unity Certifications
Learn game development with Unity
Unity Courses, Training, and Lessons on Udemy
Learn Unity 3D with Online Courses and Lessons on edX
Unity Certified Programmer Exam Preparation on Coursera
Unity Courses, Training, and Lessons on Coursera
Autodesk for Games
Getting Started with DirectX 12 Ultimate
Getting Started with Vulkan
Getting Started with Apple Metal
Game Design Online Courses from Udemy
Game Design Online Courses from Skillshare
Learn Game Design with Online Courses and Classes from edX
Game Design Courses from Coursera

Getting Started with Godot Engine

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Godot Engine is a feature-packed, cross-platform game engine to create 2D and 3D games from a unified interface. It provides a comprehensive set of common tools, so that you can focus on making games without having to reinvent the wheel. Checkout the Godot Engine Documentation for moe info.

If you would like to Donate to the Godot Project

Godot Engine

Godot Asset Library

GDNative is a Godot-specific technology that lets the engine interact with native shared libraries at run-time. You can use it to run native code without compiling it with the engine. GDNative is not a scripting language and has no relation to GDScript.

Godot Engine Tools

Godot Web Editor is a tool that allows you to open and edit your Godot project in the web browser.

Godot Web Editor

Godot Tools is a VSCode extension that provides a complete set of tools to code games with Godot Engine in Visual Studio Code.

Pixelorama is a free and open source pixel art editor, proudly created with the Godot Engine, by Orama Interactive. Whether you want to make animated pixel art, game graphics, tiles and any kind of pixel art you want, Pixelorama has you covered with its variety of tools and features. Available on Windows, Linux, macOS and the Web.

Pixelorama

Unidot Importer is a Unity compatibility layer and .unitypackage importer for Godot 4.x.

Dialogic 2.0 is a tool that creates dialogs, characters and scenes to display conversations in your Godot games.

GodotSteam is an open-source and fully functional Steamworks SDK / API module and plug-in for the Godot Game Engine.

Supported languages for Godot Engine

Community supported languages for Godot Engine

The bindings below are developed and maintained by the community (may not be production-ready):

Godot Learning Resources

Blender Development

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Blender Learning Resources

Blender is a professional, free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications and video games. For those on Linux there's an Independent Blender LTS support and services for enterprises are available now via Canonical(makers of the Ubuntu Advanced platform).

Blender Tools and Addons

Blender comes packed with import/export support for many different programs.

Including:

Image(JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, TARGA, OpenEXR, DPX, Cineon, Radiance HDR, SGI Iris, TIFF)
Video(AVI, MPEG and Quicktime (on MacOS)).
3D(Alembic, 3D Studio (3DS), COLLADA (DAE), Filmbox (FBX), Autodesk (DXF), Wavefront (OBJ), DirectX (x), Lightwave (LWO), Motion Capture (BVH), SVG, Stanford PLY, STL, VRML, VRML97, X3D).

Eevee is Blender’s realtime render engine built using OpenGL focused on speed and interactivity while achieving the goal of rendering PBR materials. Eevee can be used interactively in the 3D Viewport but also produce high quality final renders. Eevee materials are created using the same shader nodes as Cycles, making it easy to render existing scenes. For Cycles users, this makes Eevee work great for previewing materials in realtime.

Eevee final render – “Temple”. Source: Dominik Graf

Cycles is Blender’s ray-trace based production render engine.

Blender's Cycles Render Engine. Source: Blender

Blender VFX(Visual Effects). Source: Blender

FreeStyle is an edge- and line-based non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering engine. It relies on mesh data and z-depth information to draw lines on selected edge types. Various line styles can be added to produce artistic (“hand drawn”, “painted”, etc.) or technical (hard line) looks.

Modifiers are automatic operations that affect an object in a non-destructive way. With modifiers, you can perform many effects automatically that would otherwise be too tedious to update manually (such as subdivision surfaces) and without affecting the base geometry of your object.

UV Unwrapping is a tool that let's you easily unwrap your mesh right inside Blender, and use image textures or paint your own directly onto the model.

UV Sculpt is a “mode” in Blender that allows you to grab, pinch and smooth UVs, just like Sculpt Mode.

Dedicated Workspace is a feature of sculpting organic subjects using the built-in sculpting feature set of Blender.

Brushes is a feature in Blender that comes with built-in brushes such as Crease, Clay Strips, Pinch, Grab, Smooth, Mask and many more.

Dynamic topology( dyntopo) is a dynamic tessellation sculpting method, which adds and removes details on the fly, whereas regular sculpting only affects the shape of a mesh.

Masking is a feature used while sculpting, areas might be hidden behind parts of the mesh or they might be too close to other parts. To work through these, it is useful to isolate parts of a mesh to sculpt on. This can be done by either completely hiding parts of the mesh or by masking areas that can not be sculpted on.

Grease Pencil is a particular type of Blender object that allow you to draw in the 3D space. It can be use to make traditional 2D animation, cut-out animation, motion graphics or use it as storyboard tool among other things.

Constraints are a way to control an object’s properties (e.g. its location, rotation, scale), using either plain static values (like the “limit” ones), or another object, called “target” (like e.g. the “copy” ones).

Drivers are a way to control values of properties by means of a function, mathematical expression or small script.

Shape keys are used to deform objects into new shapes for animation. In other terminology, shape keys may be called “morph targets” or “blend shapes”. The most popular use cases for shape keys are in character facial animation and in tweaking and refining a skeletal rig. They are particularly useful for modeling organic soft parts and muscles where there is a need for more control over the resulting shape than what can be achieved with combination of rotation and scale.

Motion Paths is a tool allows you to visualize the motion of points as paths over a series of frames. These points can be object origins and bone joints.

Simulations is a tool that allows you to create amazing Simulations such as a crumbling building, rain, fire, smoke, fluid, cloth or full on destruction.

Blender Video Editor is a video editor that comes with a built-in video sequence editor allows you to perform basic actions like video cuts and splicing, as well as more complex tasks like video masking or color grading.

Blender Compositing is a feature that comes with an impressive library of nodes for creating camera fx, color grading, vignettes and much more Render-layer support. Along with the ability to render to multiLayer OpenEXR files.

Blender Motion Tracking is a feature that provides production ready camera and object tracking, allowing you to import raw footage, track it, mask areas and reconstruct the camera movements live in your 3d scene.

fSpy is an open source still image camera matching tool developed by Stuffmatic. Also check-out the fSpy importer for Blender.

Using the fSpy in Blender for Camera Matching a 3D model. Source:fSpy

VS Code Development

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Getting Started with VS Code

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. It comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js and has a rich ecosystem of extensions for other languages (such as C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP, Go) and runtimes (such as .NET and Unity).

VS Code

Visual Studio Marketplace is a marketplace for all extensions for Visual Studio, Azure DevOps Services, Azure DevOps Server and Visual Studio Code.

VS Code Marketplace

VS Code Documentation

Working with GitHub in VS Code

Code Server is a tool that allows you to run VS Code on any machine anywhere and access it in the browser.

GitHub Codespaces is an integrated development environment(IDE) on GitHub. That allows developers to develop entirely in the cloud using Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Also, from any repo or pull request on GitHub you can simply press the period (.) key on your keyboard to bring up the browser-based VS Code environment with the source code file ready for editing. That dot (.) press to bring up the web-based VS Code editor takes you to https://github.dev/.

Language Server Protocol (LSP) is a tool that defines the protocol used between an editor or IDE and a language server that provides language features like auto complete, go to definition, find all references.

VS Code Extensions for Developer Productivity

Visual Studio Live Share is a service/ extension that enables you to collaboratively edit and debug with others in real time, regardless of the programming languages you're using or app types you're building. You can instantly and securely share your current project, start a joint debugging session, share terminal instances, forward localhost web apps, have voice calls, and more.

GistPad is a Visual Studio Code extension that allows you to edit GitHub Gists and repositories from the comfort of your favorite editor. You can open, create, delete, fork and star gists and repositories, and then seamlessly begin editing files as if they were local, without ever cloning, pushing or pulling anything.

Live Server is an extension for Visual Studio Code that launches a development local Server with live reload feature for static & dynamic pages.

GitHub Pull Requests and Issues is an extension for Visual Studio Code that allows you to review and manage GitHub pull requests and issues in Visual Studio Code.

Terminal is an extension for Visual Studio Code that lets you run terminal command directly in the Editor.

Profile Switcher is an extension for Visual Studio Code that allows you to switch between different profiles you have created.

Material Icon Theme is an extension for Visual Studio Code that gets the Material Design icons into your VS Code.

One Dark Pro is an extension for Visual Studio Code that adds Atom's iconic One Dark theme, which is one of the most installed themes for VS Code.

VSCode Icons is an extension for Visual Studio Code that brings icons to your Visual Studio Code setup.

GitLens is an extension for Visual Studio Code that helps you visualize code authorship at a glance via Git blame annotations and code lens, seamlessly navigate and explore Git repositories, gain valuable insights via powerful comparison commands, and so much more.

Import Cost is an extension for Visual Studio Code that will display inline in the editor the size of the imported/required package. The extension utilizes webpack with babili-webpack-plugin in order to detect the imported size.

Markdown All in One is an extension for Visual Studio Code that gives you everything you need to write Markdown (keyboard shortcuts, table of contents, auto preview and more).

Bracket Pair Colorizer is an extension for Visual Studio Code that allows matching brackets to be identified with colours. The user can define which characters to match, and which colours to use.

Auto Rename Tag is an extension for Visual Studio Code that automatically add HTML/XML close tag, same as Visual Studio IDE or Sublime Text.

Auto-Close Tag is an extension for Visual Studio Code that automatically add HTML/XML close tag, same as Visual Studio IDE or Sublime Text does.

Settings Sync is an extension for Visual Studio Code that synchronizes Settings, Snippets, Themes, File Icons, Launch, Keybindings, Workspaces and Extensions Across Multiple Machines Using GitHub Gist.

Bookmarks is an extension for Visual Studio Code that lets you mark lines of code and jump to them.

Better Comments is an extension for Visual Studio Code that improves your code commenting by annotating with alert, informational, TODOs, and more.

Code Spell Checker is an extension for Visual Studio Code that works as a spelling checker for source code.

CSS Peak is an extension for Visual Studio Code that allows peeking to css ID and class strings as definitions from html files to respective CSS. It also allows peek and goto definition.

Tailwind CSS IntelliSense is an extension for Visual Studio Code that enhances the Tailwind development experience by providing Visual Studio Code users with advanced features such as autocomplete, syntax highlighting, and linting.

Prettier is an extension for Visual Studio Code that is an opinionated code formatter. It enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and re-printing it with its own rules that take the maximum line length into account, wrapping code when necessary.

NPM Intellisense is an extension for Visual Studio Code that autocompletes npm modules in import statements.

Path Intellisense is an extension for Visual Studio Code that autocompletes filenames.

Relative Path is an extension for Visual Studio Code that gets the relative url paths from files in the current workspace.

Path Autocomplete is an extension for Visual Studio Code that provides path completion for visual studio code.

Discord Presence is an extension for Visual Studio Code that updates your discord status with a rich presence.

Code Runner is an extension for Visual Studio Code that runs code snippets or code files for multiple languages: C/C++, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Go, Lua, Groovy, PowerShell, BASH/SH, C#, F#, .NET Core, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Scala, Swift, Julia, OCaml, R, Elixir, Clojure, Haxe, Objective-C, Rust, Racket, Scheme, Kotlin, Dart, Haskell, Nim, D, CUDA, and custom command.

Kite is an extension for Visual Studio Code that provides an AI-powered programming assistant that helps you write code faster inside Visual Studio Code. Kite works for all major programming languages: Python, Java, Go, PHP, C/C#/C++, Javascript, HTML/CSS, Typescript, React, Ruby, Scala, Kotlin, Bash, Vue and React.

Tabnine is an extension for Visual Studio Code that provides an AI code completion tool trusted by millions of developers to code faster with fewer errors. Whether you are a new dev or a seasoned pro, working solo or part of a team, Tabnine will help push your productivity to new heights while cutting your QA time in your favorite IDE.

Xcode Development

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Xcode Guide

Getting Started with Xcode

Apple Developer Documentation for Xcode

Xcode includes everything developers need to create great applications for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Xcode provides developers a unified workflow for user interface design, coding, testing, and debugging. Xcode 12 is built as an Universal app that runs 100% natively on Intel-based CPUs and Apple Silicon. It includes a unified macOS SDK that features all the frameworks, compilers, debuggers, and other tools you need to build apps that run natively on Apple Silicon and the Intel x86_64 CPU.

Developing with SwiftUI in Xcode 12

Xcode Cloud is a continuous integration and delivery service built into Xcode and designed expressly for Apple developers. It accelerates the development and delivery of high-quality apps by bringing together cloud-based tools that help you build apps, run automated tests in parallel, deliver apps to testers, and view and manage user feedback.

Xcode Cloud. Source: Apple

SwiftUI is a user interface toolkit that provides views, controls, and layout structures for declaring your app's user interface. The SwiftUI framework provides event handlers for delivering taps, gestures, and other types of input to your application.

UIKit is a framework provides the required infrastructure for your iOS or tvOS apps. It provides the window and view architecture for implementing your interface, the event handling infrastructure for delivering Multi-Touch and other types of input to your app, and the main run loop needed to manage interactions among the user, the system, and your app.

AppKit is a graphical user interface toolkit that contains all the objects you need to implement the user interface for a macOS app such as windows, panels, buttons, menus, scrollers, and text fields, and it handles all the details for you as it efficiently draws on the screen, communicates with hardware devices and screen buffers, clears areas of the screen before drawing, and clips views.

ARKit is a set set of software development tools to enable developers to build augmented-reality apps for iOS developed by Apple. The latest version ARKit 3.5 takes advantage of the new LiDAR Scanner and depth sensing system on iPad Pro(2020) to support a new generation of AR apps that use Scene Geometry for enhanced scene understanding and object occlusion.

RealityKit is a framework to implement high-performance 3D simulation and rendering with information provided by the ARKit framework to seamlessly integrate virtual objects into the real world.

SceneKit is a high-level 3D graphics framework that helps you create 3D animated scenes and effects in your iOS apps.

Mac Catalyst is a set of Apple APIs that developers can use to rapidly port their iOS apps to Apple Silicon M1 Chip and take full advantage of the new capabilities on the new Apple hardware.

Instruments is a powerful and flexible performance-analysis and testing tool that’s part of the Xcode tool set. It’s designed to help you profile your iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS apps, processes, and devices in order to better understand and optimize their behavior and performance.

TestFlight is a tool that makes it easy to invite users to test your apps and App Clips and collect valuable feedback before releasing your apps on the App Store. It allows you to invite up to 10,000 testers using just their email address or by sharing a public link.

Xcode Developer Platforms for Apps

macOS is an advanced desktop operating system (OS) for Apple's series of desktops and laptops.

macOS Monterey. Source: Apple

iOS is an advanced mobile operating system (OS) for Apple's series of iPhone products.

iOS 15. Source: Apple

iPadOS is an advanced mobile operating system (OS) for Apple's series of iPad products.

iPadOS 15. Source: Apple

WatchOS is an advanced mobile operating system (OS) for Apple's series of Watch products.

WatchOS 8. Source: Apple

tvOS is an advanced mobile operating system (OS) for Apple's series of TV products.

tvOS 15. Source: Apple

Game Development

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Game Development Tools

NVIDIA Reflex is a new feature that was introduced with the RTX 30(3000) series GPUs that allows game developers to implement a low latency mode that aligns game engine work to complete just-in-time for rendering, eliminating the GPU render queue and reducing CPU back pressure in GPU-bound scenarios. In addition to latency reduction functions, the SDK also features measurement markers to calculate both Game and Render Latency that are great for debugging and visualizing in-game performance counter.

NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is a temporal image upscaling AI rendering technology that increases graphics performance using dedicated Tensor Core AI processors on GeForce RTX™ GPUs. DLSS uses the power of a deep learning neural network to boost frame rates and generate beautiful, sharp images for your games.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is an open source, high-quality solution for producing high resolution frames from lower resolution inputs. It uses a collection of cutting-edge Deep Learning algorithms with a particular emphasis on creating high-quality edges, giving large performance improvements compared to rendering at native resolution directly. FSR enables “practical performance” for costly render operations, such as hardware ray tracing for the AMD RDNA™ and AMD RDNA™ 2 architectures.

Intel Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) is a temporal image upscaling AI rendering technology that increases graphics performance similar to NVIDIA's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). Intel's Arc GPU architecture (early 2022) will have GPUs that feature dedicated Xe-cores to run XeSS. The GPUs will have Xe Matrix eXtenstions matrix (XMX) engines for hardware-accelerated AI processing. XeSS will be able to run on devices without XMX, including integrated graphics, though, the performance of XeSS will be lower on non-Intel graphics cards because it will be powered by DP4a instruction.

Unigine is a cross-platform game engine designed for development teams (C++/C# programmers, 3D artists) working on interactive 3D apps.

Frostbite is a game engine developed by DICE, designed for cross-platform use on Microsoft Windows and game consoles such as PlayStation 3 Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Panda3D is a game engine, a framework for 3D rendering and game development for Python and C++ programs, developed by Disney and CMU. Panda3D is open-source and free for any purpose, including commercial ventures.

Source 2 is a 3D video game engine in development by Valve as a successor to Source. It is used in Dota 2, Artifact, Dota Underlords, parts of The Lab, SteamVR Home, and Half-Life: Alyx.

Havok is a middleware software suite that provides a realistic physics engine component and related functions to video games. It is supported and optimized across all major platforms, including Nintendo Switch, PlayStation®, Stadia, and Xbox. Along with integrations for Unity and Unreal Engine and are used in countless proprietary game engines.

AutoDesk 3ds Max is a professional software program for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and visualization. 3ds Max allows you to create stunning game environments, design visualizations, and virtual reality experiences.

Houdini is a 3D procedural software for modeling, rigging, animation, VFX, look development, lighting and rendering in film, TV, advertising and video game pipelines.

A-Frame is a web framework for building virtual reality experiences in WebVR with HTML and Entity-Component. A-Frame works on Vive, Rift, desktop, mobile platforms.

AppGameKit is a powerful game development engine, ideal for Hobbyist and Indie developers. Where you can start coding in the easy to learn AppGameKit BASIC or use the libraries in C++ & XCode.

Amazon Lumberyard is an open source, AAA game engine(based on CryEngine) that gives you the tools you need to create high quality games. Deeply integrated with AWS and Twitch, Amazon Lumberyard includes full source code, allowing you to customize your project at any level.

Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.

CryEngine is a powerful real-time game development platform created by Crytek.

GameMaker Studio 2 is the latest and greatest incarnation of GameMaker. It has everything you need to take your idea from concept to finished game. With no barriers to entry and powerful functionality, GameMaker Studio 2 is the ultimate 2D development environment.

Godot is a feature-packed, cross-platform game engine to create 2D and 3D games from a unified interface. It provides a comprehensive set of common tools, so that users can focus on making games without having to reinvent the wheel. Games can be exported in one click to a number of platforms, including the major desktop platforms (Linux, Mac OSX, Windows) as well as mobile (Android, iOS) and web-based (HTML5) platforms.

Open Graphics Library(OpenGL) is an API used acrossed mulitple programming languages and platforms for hardware-accelerated rendering of 2D/3D vector graphics currently developed by the Khronos Group.

Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is an open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other hardware accelerators found in supercomputers, cloud servers, personal computers, mobile devices and embedded platforms.

OpenGL Shading Language(GLSL) is a High Level Shading Language based on the C-style language, so it covers most of the features a user would expect with such a language. Such as control structures (for-loops, if-else statements, etc) exist in GLSL, including the switch statement.

High Level Shading Language(HLSL) is the High Level Shading Language for DirectX. Using HLSL, the user can create C-like programmable shaders for the Direct3D pipeline. HLSL was first created with DirectX 9 to set up the programmable 3D pipeline.

DirectX 12 Ultimate is an API(for high performance 2D & 3D graphics) from Microsoft. DirectX 12 Ultimate brings support for ray tracing, mesh shaders, variable rate shading, and sampler feedback. Available in Windows 2004 version(May 2020 Update).

Vulkan is a modern cross-platform graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms. Vulkan is currently in development by the Khronos consortium.

Metal is a low-level GPU programming framework used for rendering 2D and 3D graphics on Apple platforms such as iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.

MoltenVK is an implementation of Vulkan running on iOS and macOS using Apple's Metal graphics framework.

MoltenGL is an implementation of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API that runs on Apple's Metal graphics framework.

Mesa 3D Graphics Library is a project began as an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification. A system for rendering interactive 3D graphics. Mesa ties into several other open-source projects: the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, X.org, and Wayland to provide OpenGL support on Linux, FreeBSD, and other operating systems.

OpenGL ES is the mobile subset of OpenGL. It's supported on all major mobile platforms, and is also the base for WebGL.

OpenCL is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, FPGAs and other processors or hardware accelerators.

EGL is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system.

VDPAU is the Video Decode and Presentation API for UNIX. It provides an interface to video decode acceleration and presentation hardware present in modern GPUs.

VA API is an open-source library and API specification, which provides access to graphics hardware acceleration capabilities for video processing.

XvMC is an extension of the X video extension (Xv) for the X Window System. The XvMC API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process to the GPU hardware.

AMD Radeon ProRender is a powerful physically-based rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images on virtually any GPU, any CPU, and any OS in over a dozen leading digital content creation and CAD applications.

NVIDIA Omniverse is a powerful, multi-GPU, real-time simulation and collaboration platform for 3D production pipelines based on Pixar's Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX.

LibGDX is a cross-platform Java game development framework based on OpenGL (ES) that works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, your WebGL enabled browser and iOS.

cocos2d-x is a multi-platform framework for building 2d games, interactive books, demos and other graphical applications. It is based on cocos2d-iphone, but instead of using Objective-C, it uses C++. It works on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux.

MonoGame is a framework for creating powerful cross-platform games. The spiritual successor to XNA with thousands of titles shipped across desktop, mobile, and console platforms. MonoGame is a fully managed .NET open source game framework without any black boxes.

Three.js is a cross-browser JavaScript library and application programming interface used to create and display animated 3D computer graphics in a web browser using WebGL.

Superpowers is a downloadable HTML5 app for real-time collaborative projects . You can use it solo like a regular offline game maker, or setup a password and let friends join in on your project through their Web browser.

URHO3D is a free lightweight, cross-platform 2D and 3D game engine implemented in C++ and released under the MIT license. Greatly inspired by OGRE and Horde3D.

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Steam Deck

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Steam Deck is a handheld gaming computer developed by Valve Corporation in cooperation with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). It allows users to play their entire Steam game library but can be modified by the user to run other gaming storefronts or applications. The Steam Deck will start shipping February 2022.

Steam Deck device. Source: Steam Deck

Steam OS 3.0 is an immutable Operating System(OS) using the KDE Plasma desktop. This allows you to install applications in containers using Flatpak, rather than onto the root filesystem. This means not only that the installation of applications is isolated from the core filesystem, but also that the ability for malicious applications to compromise/break your system is significantly reduced.

SteamOS 3.0 with KDE Plasma Deskop

Steam Deck Specs:

Operating system: SteamOS 3.0 based on ArchLinux.

System on a chip (SoC): AMD custom APU.

CPU: Zen 2, 4-core, 8-threads, variable frequency @ 2.4–3.5 GHz.

Memory: 16 GB LPDDR5 @ 5500 MT/s.

Storage Options:

Base model: 64 GB eMMC for $399(US).
Mid model: 256 GB NVMe SSD for $529(US).
Top model: 512 GB NVMe SSD for $649(US).

All models use M.2 2230 interface.

Removable Storage: microSD supports up to 2TB of additional storage for games.

Display: 7-inch, 1280 × 800 LCD, native 720p @ 60Hz.

Docked: Up to 8K @ 60Hz or 4K @ 120Hz.

Graphics: RDNA 2 with 8 CUs, variable frequency @ 1.0–1.6 GHz.