Game Dev Digest Issue #101 - Upgrade Your UI

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Let's give some love to UI this week, whether it's in-game or in the editor. Enjoy!

What’s new in UI Toolkit? - Create UI for games and applications with UI Toolkit, now equipped with runtime support in 2021.2
Unity

Volumetric Heat Diffusion for Automatic Mesh Skinning - I wanted to use the GPU-based mesh voxelizer we previously wrote to implement an automatic skinning algorithm. We’ll use a heat diffusion algorithm to radiate heat through the voxels to tie bones to vertices. This article focuses on the implementation of the volumetric heat diffusion algorithm. By the way, I’ll post a link to the code on Github at the end.
Bronson Zgeb

Data-Oriented Design (Or Why You Might Be Shooting Yourself in The Foot With OOP) - Picture this: Toward the end of the development cycle, your game crawls, but you don’t see any obvious hotspots in the profiler. The culprit? Random memory access patterns and constant cache misses. [more data-oriented design discussion on Hacker News]
gamesfromwithin.com

How to run jobs using BufferFromEntity in parallel: Children entities in a hash map - In my previous post, I talked about how to run jobs with ComponentDataFromEntity (CDFE) that writes to a list or a set of values in parallel. This is useful for parent-child relationships where the child entities are maintained in a list on the parent. In this post, I want to share with you a different variant of that design. What if the children are maintained in a hash map? How do we run jobs for that in parallel? Read on to find out.
Coffee Brain Games

State of Unity Distribution Portal: June 2021 - Find out below how Unity’s mobile game distribution solution is further assisting developers in mobile game store registrations and submissions; meet one of our new, uniquely rewarding partner stores; and see what else is new with UDP.
Unity

Videos

How I Made My Game Feel Awesome! - GMTK Game Jam - Unity Devlog - In this video I will be showcasing my GMTK 2021 gamejam entry called 'My Turret Friend' in which I focused on game feel. I wanted this game to feel incredibly fun to play, in which game feel takes a major role.
GoldenEvolution

Making a Snake with Snake Like Movement in Unity (Part 1/2) - In this tutorial, we use the game SNKRX as inspiration to push ourselves to make a feature found in a commercial game, namely the creation of a snake with different prefabs as bodyparts and the movement of that snake. This game is very thorough and good for people of all skill levels. I hope it helps!
Random Art Attack

FPS Shooter FADING HEALTH System in Unity - FPS Games like Battlefield and Call of Duty feature a fading health UI system, where incoming damage is received as a visual cue in the form of blood splatter effects and red indicators. I'll show you how to create the health UI, take damage from an explosive mine, use sound effects and regenerate your health over time by fading out this damaged effect.
SpeedTutor

New filmmaking tools for Unity - Mini Tutorial - A number of folks have asked me to break down how I achieved my latest short "What if Pacific Rim Was Cute?"
Little Mountain Animation

Unity Shader Graph - Glowing Crystals Tutorial - Let's see how to create some Glowing Crystals with Unity Shader Graph and Blender! Here's the whole process from scratch. A simple technique with a pretty cool outcome.
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

Drawing Boxes and Rectangles in URP Shader Graph with 2D SDFs! | Unity Game Dev Tutorial - Squares, boxes, and rounded rectangles are all common shapes you might want to draw in a shader. In this video, I show you how to do that using 2D signed distance fields, or SDFs. We'll derive the formula, recreate it in the shader graph, and then make some cool shaders to see it in action: including a mouse-controlled rectangle drawer, rainbow SDF visualizer, and procedural brick wall.
Ned Makes Games

Fluffy Foliage, Wind and Subsurface Scattering: [Unity Shader Graph and Amplify] - Easy foliage shader tutorial for Unity, made with Shadergraph and Amplify (tutorial uses Amplify, check Patreon for downloads of both) could also be used for some basic fur. Includes wind system and subsurface scattering. Bazinga.
PolyToots

Critiquing Game Visuals: Common Problems and How to Solve Them - In this 2019 GDC talk, Spry Fox's Ally Overton gives you tools to help you analyze your own game's visuals and give feedback on how to improve them.
GDC

Levelling Up Animations in Unity with IK - In this episode we take a look at how we can use tools like Final IK and the Animation Rigging Package to take our animations to the next level!
Game Dev Guide

Animated Character from BLENDER 2.93 To UNITY 2021 with Correct Rotation - This is a quick video to show how to export an animated character from Blender 2.93 to Unity 2021 with the correct rotation so that the character is facing in Unity's Z forward direction without any internal rotations of the armature or mesh.
Imphenzia

Assets

Smash Hit Summer - Asset Store Sale - Over the next seven weeks, Unity is launching a series of weekly sales, each with a unique game development theme. Each week, approximately 150 assets will be on sale for 50% off and the assets included will all be great selections to use when making a game highlighted in the weekly theme.

The top assets from one week will carry over into the next week and new assets will be added. The final two weeks of the sale will feature the top assets from the first five weeks, plus an additional set of our most popular assets.

NodeGraphProcessor - Node graph editor framework focused on data processing using Unity UIElements, GraphView and C# 4.7.
This node based solution provides a great C# API allowing you to implement conditional graphs, dependencies graphs, processing graphs and more.
alelievr Open Source

PixelGraphics - PixelGraphics is a collection of interactive foliage shaders for Unity Tested on Unity 2020.2 - PC & WebGL
[view it in action on Youtube]
aarthificial Open Source

VerticalDissolve - This shader allows you to dissolve objects in a vertical fashion, and provides several parameters to create unique transitions.
It can be edited through Amplify Shader Editor and contributions to the project are always welcome!
AdultLink Open Source

Unmask For UGUI - Reverse mask for uGUI element in Unity.
mob-sakai Open Source

LittleHelper - [Improves editor UX with additions of a distance ruler, object size display, quick select, automatic sizing of text, and more]
pjc0247 Open Source

AddressablesServices - A set of classes to convert Unity Addressables callbacks/coroutine workflow to async/await with UniTask. Unity 2020.1+
dre0dru Open Source

UniScript - Other C# scripts use mcs or roslyn. They're all compiler based not an interpreter however UniScript uses a SlowSharp as a backend which enables.... Sandboxing : Can prevent malicious call with Whitelist, Blacklist or your own rules.
Park June Chul Open Source

Scene View Picker - Sometimes scene hierarchies get complex and you get in a frustrating situation where you need to assign a field and you know exactly where it is in the scene, but it's hard to point out in the hierarchy. I figured: why not make something to allow you to assign fields by pointing where the object is in the scene? That's exactly what this is.
Roy Theunissen Open Source

Compilation Visualizer for Unity - This tool visualizes the assembly compilation process in Unity3D. It hooks into the Editor-provided events and nicely draws them on a timeline. That's especially helpful when trying to optimize compile times and dependencies between assemblies. Besides showing a graphical view of compilation, selecting an assembly shows both dependencies and dependents of that assembly.
needle-tools Open Source

San Andreas Unity - San Andreas Unity is an open source reimplementation of GTA San Andreas game engine in Unity.
GTA-ASM Open Source

Welcome to Expresso Bits Console - Commands with easy access, persistent logs in the form of toasts, command history, and more.
ExpressoBits Open Source

Sand Shader - in Unity URP for Mobile Phones - Mobile friendly Unity sand/snow shader using the Universal Render Pipeline - Uses Unity Version 2020.1.2f1
TheodorKnab Open Source

Spotlight

Rift World - RIFT WORLD Is a hardcore FPS game full of action-fueled magical encounters set in a surreal parallel world. You play as a young mage with a wanderlust for adventure, learning how to control raw sorcerous power and find a way through chaotic realms and hordes of fearsome enemies present within Rift World.

[You can back the game on Kickstarter, or try the demo now on Steam]
Cerulean Interactive

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