Facebook’s new SDK for Unity v7.1 provides the opportunity for Unity developers to better integrate their games with Facebook. The new update includes full support for Unity 5, support for the new WebGL build target and Facebook’s latest native mobile SDKs with new tools and features. The Facebook SDK for Unity complements Unity’s cross-platform support, providing a pure-Unity write-once, run-everywhere experience across the gaming platforms of WebGL, Unity Web Player, Android and iOS.
Intel has updated its graphics drivers for users of 4th generation Core processors. The headline benefits to updating your Haswell based system’s drivers is that the integrated graphics component will give you up to 10 per cent better performance in games and up to 30 per cent better performance in OpenCL. This driver update may be particularly interesting to those with systems which rely upon Intel graphics and have no graphic card upgrade options - laptops and devices like the Surface Pro 3.
The winner of Khronos’ Fall 2014 WebGL Widget Contest is the team of William Casola and Marco Tarini, with their interactive Spinnable World Map. They won a WebGL book from Packt Publishing, two WebGL books from O’Reilly, and an NVidia Shield Gaming Tablet. Congratulations! Honorable mention goes to the Orbiting Spheres entry from Tarek Sherif.
The crew at Owlchemy Labs were given the unique opportunity to work closely with Unity, maker of the leading cross-platform game engine, and Humble to attempt to bring one of our games, “Aaaaa! for the Awesome”, a collaboration with Dejobaan Games, to the web via technologies like WebGL and asm.js.
NVIDIA has co-sponsored the WebGL Widget contest by contributing a new Shield Gaming Tablet as one of the prizes. This is in addition to two WebGL books Toni Parisi by sponsored by O’Reilly media; and the WebGL book by Sumeet Arora sponsored by Packt Publishing. Submit your best WebGL Widget by November 25 for a chance to win! We’ve recently increased the size limit from 30K to 200K. What can you create?
Samsung gave a talk on using WebCL in HTML5 gaming at the last “Next Game Frontier” event in France last March. The video from this talk is available online.
Epic Games and Mozilla are demonstrating how the web is continuing to evolve as a powerful platform for gaming by providing a sneak peek of Epic’s Soul and Swing Ninja demos, running in Firefox at near-native speeds. This video is the first glimpse of Unreal Engine 4 running on the Web using WebGL. To see these products in action at GDC, come by our South Hall booth #205 or Epic’s booth #1224.
WebGL, Emscripten, asm.js and Web Audio API are a few technologies that ensure that the Web offers the best and most complete platform for gaming possible. To showcase these technologies, Mozilla and Goo Technologies are looking for budding game creators to show us their creative genius. To create your games, you will be using the Goo platform consisting of Goo Engine – a 3D JavaScript gaming engine entirely built on WebGL/HTML5 – and Goo Create – a visual editing tool running on top of the engine. There are three categories and everyone is welcome: Best Amateur Interactive Game Scene, Best Desktop Game and Best Mobile Game.
CopperCube is ideal for creating 3D educational programs, architectural visualizations, military simulations, product configurators, games, e-learning applications and 3D prototypes. The most recent release now offers WebGL support for Internet Explorer 11.
@notch of Minecraft fame is now working on a WebGL app. As pointed out by Brandon Jones, Notch is demonstrating the ability to ramp up quickly in todays age of coding.
Goo Technologies creates HTML 5 high-end graphics for games and interactive visualizations on the Web and is the company behind the Goo Engine. The findings of their 2013 State of Browser Gaming Index are out, and guess what, over half of americans play browser based games. This bodes well for WebGL. Goo Technologies is a web technology company whose aim is to make all digital experiences instantly available on all devices, everywhere using HTML5 and WebGL.
Artillery gaming company is made up of former Google and Facebook engineers and Sean “Day[9]” Plott—host of StarCraft strategy webshow The Day[9] Daily—as lead game designer, plans to use WebGL and HTML5 to create console-quality games for browsers. While little is known about the game, Artillery’s mission statement is “dragging core gaming kicking and screaming into the browser using the latest HTML5 and WebGL technology”.
AMD today announced its collaboration with Mixamo on the launch of Face Plus, an advanced real-time motion capture and 3D facial animation technology for the Unity game engine. Face Plus was developed for devices that support OpenCL™ 1.1 or newer versions.