Game Dev

Halo going Unreal Engine, but not Bethesda

The studio behind the recent Halo games, 343 Industries, has just been renamed to Halo Studios and announced the next Halo game will be built in Unreal Engine 5.

It's definitely important news to see such a huge developer changing from a custom engine to a third party engine, usually developers on this scale use their own custom engines. EA has Frostbite, Call of Duty has the IW Engine, Ubisoft has the Anvil engine and so on.

Using a custom engine is an interesting decision, it gives developers more power, but also adds cost to training new employees since they won't be familiar with these internal engines. On the other hand using something like Unreal Engine or Unity means you have a larger pool of talent to pull from without requiring retraining but due to being general purpose engines they won’t be as good as something custom.

Bethesda also has their own engine, Creation Engine 2, which they are sticking with. There was an interesting interview with the Skyrim lead designer which provides lots of excellent context for people who are not familiar with what exactly is a "game engine". And what he mentions is that game engines are just tools, changing an engine won't automatically make the game better. There are great and terrible games made with every engine.

Game Dev

Build a CPU inside a game!

One developer made a fascinating project building a working CPU inside a Unity game.

This looks extremely complex and from what I understand it's all physically accurate. If you know how to build circuits in real life you should be able to build them here. The dev mentions how you can build Ben Eater's 8-bit CPU and it runs at over 600Hz.

This has apparently been out on Steam for a few years but is getting a major update soon, the developer mentions it will bring a massive performance improvement, makes me wonder if they are using DOTS to get those results.

If you like this then also check out Sebastian Lague's excellent series covering How Computers Work which also has an interactive Unity project you can play or download.

Tech

Internet archive hacked

One of the best things on the internet, the Internet Archive, has just been hacked. The database was stolen on September 28th containing data for 31 million users, including email addresses, encrypted passwords and more.

The records have been added to haveibeenpwned.com where you can see if your data has been compromised.

The website is still down as of right now but it appears some services are coming back online.

Fun

Nintendo New Hardware! (but not what you think)

Nintendo has just announced new hardware but it's not exactly what people wanted. It's not the Switch 2, instead it's the Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo.

Yup it's an alarm clock with Nintendo sounds and characters. When it's time it starts playing songs from various Nintendo games like Super Mario, Zelda, Splatoon. Then it also has a motion sensor and as you roll around in your bed it will play sound effects from that game, and as it detects you getting up it will play a victory sound and stop automatically.

It also plays sleepy soothing sounds at night to help you get to sleep, it records movement while you sleep, and has fun animations at the top of every hour.

This is a very silly fun gadget, although at $100 it's pretty pricey. The motion sensor also does not work if there are multiple people (or pets) in the same bed.