News: News and Community Spotlight intro from Unreal Engine.

The well-known game engine called Unreal Engine comes in mid-April 2021 with a summary of its possibilities in a short introductory video.

The video deals with aspects related to game engine development in an elementary way.

CodePen: Lottie for Web, Android, iOS, React Native, and Windows - 001.

Lottie is a mobile library for Web, and iOS that parses Adobe After Effects animations exported as JSON with Bodymovin and renders them natively on mobile!, see GitHub project.

You can find Lottie files on this website. 

This is a simple example with lottie-player.js:

See the Pen lottie-player html 001 by Cătălin George Feștilă (@catafest) on CodePen.

News: Industrialists on EVE Online.

EVE Online is a community-driven spaceship MMORPG where players can play free, choosing their own path from countless options. Experience space exploration, immense PvP and PvE battles and a thriving player economy in an ever-expanding sandbox. Participate in many in-game professions and activities, including war, politics, piracy, trading, and exploration, across 7,000 star systems with hundreds of thousands of other players. 

Today this online game with the news:

Industrialists shape the universe of EVE Online, being responsible for supplying the ships, ammo, and equipment that fuel the biggest wars in gaming history. 

You can download it and play it from the official website.

Everything he touches into chickens!

The game Neverwinter come with this new feature:

... who has an unfortunate condition of turning everything he touches into chickens!

CodePen: A simple progressbar with CSS.

A simple test with CSS about how to create two simple progress bars. The code source of this example - https://codepen.io/catafest/pen/rNjmdwa show us about the cascading source code in CSS and how this works pe properties in CSS. This difference of the source code in CSS change the speed of the animation:

 animation: animate 6s ease-in-out infinite;
...
 animation: animate 1s ease-in-out infinite;

Some changes to the CSS source code are not allowed because they have no effect on the end result or must be used in order to complete the base code and have the end result. Another good example is flex:

display: flex;

On the parent element also changes how width and height work. CSS codes defines have no effect on a flex container. ... I can tell you that it is not very easy to change a project based on CSS, so the steps of designing and building a website are very important.

See the Pen CSS excample 001 by Cătălin George Feștilă (@catafest) on CodePen.

OpenProcessing - simple tree_001.

This is modified example from this in order to build another good tree using openprocessing website interface.

You can see this example on my account.

Let's see the source code:

/*--based on https://openprocessing.org/sketch/396851--*/

var nbranchs = 73;
function setup() {
  createCanvas(640, 400);
  background(0, 0, 128);
  
  noFill();
  stroke(128);
  noLoop();
}

function draw() {
  tree(100, 200, 150, 350);
}
function mousePressed() {
  background(0, 0, 128);
  redraw();
}

function branch(x, y, dx, dy) {
  var sign = random(dx+1.0)/(abs(dx)+5.0);
  
  for (var i = 0; i <= x; i += 3) {
    var idx = i/x;
    
    var xi = bezierPoint(x, x + dx/2,   x + dx, x + dx, idx);
    var yi = bezierPoint(y, y, y + dy, y + dy, idx);

    line(xi, yi, xi + sign*random(8), yi + random(18));  
	
  }
}

function tree(left, right, top, bottom) {
  for (var idx = 0; idx < nbranchs; idx += 1) {
    
    // choose a random y position
    var y = random(bottom, top);
		
    
    // choose a random x position inside of a triangle
    var dx = map(y, bottom, top, 0.0, (right-left)/2.0);
    var x = random(left + dx, right - dx);
		
    var x1 = random(left + dx, right - dx);
    
		// choose the size of the branch according to the position on the tree
    var w = map (x, left, right, random(-25) -25, random(25)+25) + 1;
    var h = map (y, bottom, top, 5 +random(20), 5);
    
		var w1 = map (x, left, right, random(-35), random(35)) + 3;
    var h1 = map (y, bottom, top, random(10), random(10));
    // randonize the size
    var dw = random(-10, 5);
    var dh = random (-5, 5);
  	
		var dw1 = random(-5, 1);
    var dh1 = random (-1, 1);
    // create the new branch
		branch(x1, y, w1 + dw1, h1 + dh1);
		stroke(random(0),random(128),random(15));
		branch(x1, y, w1 + dw1, h1 + dh1);
		stroke(random(25),random(255),random(50));
    branch(x, y, w + dw, h + dh);
    
  }
}

Boxy SVG - tool for editing SVG files.

This online tool for drawing and working with SVG file format comes with this intro:

Boxy SVG project goal is to create the best tool for editing SVG files. For beginners as well as for professional web designers and web developers. On any device and operating system. 

 ... 

 Boxy SVG is built around the idea that user interfaces should get out of the way. There is no crowded workspace with overlapping dialogs or dozens of opened palettes and toolbars. Your illustration takes the center stage. Whether it's the editing of shapes or adjustment of gradient fills, most of the action is taking place directly on the canvas. Fine control over the changes is available in panels that you can expand and then collapse with a single click or keypress. Many features are accessible with keyboard shortcuts that you can customize to your liking. This is especially useful if you are coming with a lot of muscle memory from years of using other vector graphics editors.

The tool comes with a trial for 15 days or you can subscribe with these two options: 9.99 USD/ year or 9.99 USD/month register with your account.

On the official webpage, the Linux version is Free.

I install it easily on my Fedora 33 distro Linux with the snap tool:

[mythcat@desk ~]$ snap search boxy
Name      Version  Publisher    Notes  Summary
boxy-svg  3.46.0   jarek-foksa  -      Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) editor
boxy-svg 3.46.0 from Jarosław Foksa (jarek-foksa) installed
...

I tested all features of this tool and, is very good for an SVG tool.

You can see many tutorials with this online tool from the official youtube channel.

In the next video you can see one video tutorial with the SVG library of this online tool:

Vectr comes with WordPress Plugin.

I wrote about this online tool in the past but now comes with WordPress plugin.

Take a look on this video tutorial:

News : NeoAxis Engine 2021.1 Released.

On March 10, 2021 the well-known game engine NeoAxis came with a new release.

NeoAxis company releases a new version of NeoAxis Engine, an integrated development environment with built-in 3D/2D game engine. The environment can be used to develop all kinds of 3D and 2D projects such as computer games, visual trainers, VR systems, to visualize processes and develop windowed applications. NeoAxis 2021.1 includes improvements for ambient lighting, metal materials, rendering speed, rendering quality, basic content. Has been added a set of paid add-ons such as Industrial Kit, Pipe Constructor, Fence Constructor, Road Constructor.

See the full released article on the official webpage.

This is the full changelog of this relese:

• Significant improvements to the speed of the rendering pipeline.
• Industrial Kit.
• Pipe Constructor.
• Fence Constructor.
• Road Constructor.
• Basic Materials library has been updated.
• Now it contains 206 materials.
• Basic Environments library has been updated.
• Now it contains 27 skyboxes.
• World generator component to make environments procedurally.
• A new scene template with the generator has been added.
• A new forest scene template.
• Terrain and mesh layers:
• Now is not needed to configure Blend Mode and Mask manually for materials.
• This done automatically by the engine.
• Terrain: The curvature in the calculation of texture coordinates has been added.
• The curvature is intended to reduce the tiling effect.
• Material editor: Remove Texture Tiling parameter for samplers.
• Editor: Export component to file.
• To export use context menu for selected components.
• Outline screen effect.
• Outline selection mode for meshes and billboards.
• The starting scenes are better configured.
• The ability to configure the multiplier of affecting skybox color and scene background color to ambient lighting.
• Character: First person camera mode has been improved.
• Curve In Space: Support of geometry rendering, collision.
• Scene editor: The button to change rendering debug mode in the ribbon.
• Skybox: The ability to set special cubemap for ambient lighting has been added.
• Mesh: The ability to export to FBX has been added.
• More abilities for add-on creation of the scene editor.
• ComputeUsingThreads component has been added. It is an auxiliary class to make optimized calculations using threads.
• Sample scene - 'Samples\Starter Content\Scenes\Compute using threads.scene'.
• Reflection Probe: Camera settings fixes.
• The ability to set Rotation, Multiplier, RenderSky has been added.
• Rendering Pipeline: Per object cut volumes support.
• UIWebBrowser has been updated.
• Optimization: Faster FBX import.
• Optimization: Faster rendering pipeline.
• Bug fix: Flipped skyboxes which in 2:1 size format.
• Bug fix: Mesh collision shape works wrong on some meshes.
• Bug fix: Various minor bug fixes.

SelfCAD 3D online tool.

SelfCAD is an affordable 3D modeling software that can match any skill level

The official website lets you pay monthly or annually, and cancel any time or you can use FREE.

The official youtube channel comes with many video tutorials.

The next video tutorial is about animation on SelfCAD:

News: NVIDIA lets you access Clara Parabricks Pipelines.

It is very interesting and very useful news for those who process and process data.

Based on Broad Institute’s Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK), NVIDIA Clara Parabricks Pipelines is a ready-to-run, GPU-accelerated software suite for DNA Germline variant calling for population genomics, DNA Somatic variant calling for cancer genomics and RNA sequencing projects from whole-transcriptome to single-cell analysis. Optimized for speed, accuracy, and scalability, Clara Parabricks Pipelines can run the GATK4.1 Best Practices and is fully configurable, allowing users to choose which steps, parameter settings, and versions of the pipeline to run.

The bobsprite editor - web tool .

This online editor has several functions to create sprites and animations used in game development

The development team tells us:

BobSprite is a browser-based free online sprite editor excellent for pixel art. It also has tools and effects for normal drawing and painting.

I found an video tutorial on youtube with this online tool:

Unity 3D : Procedural animation features.

Unity 3D game engine comes with procedural animation features.

Procedural animation is a type of computer animation, used to automatically generate animation in real-time to allow for a more diverse series of actions than could otherwise be created using predefined animations.

The Unity learn area comes with a full course and project files.

You can read the full article on the Unity blog, and see the video tutorial: