This Week in Game Engines #36

Welcome to This week in Game Engines! This is a digest on gamedev tech news and articles from the week before.

A slower week, but a gamedev week nonetheless. We have a much necessary Unreal Engine Verse language overview, new Game Engine Hubs launching, if only I knew the golden days of Xbox Live wouldn’t last forever, an FPS aim trainer with applied Cognitive Science magic, and more!

The Verse of Scripting Languages

Future of Verse

I mentioned a couple of newsletters ago about the Unreal Engine planned changes for 6.0, when the scripting language Verse is taking the spotlight as the 'official' scripting programming tool while Blueprints will gradually fade into the sunset.

Right now Verse is mainly available for Unreal Engine for Fortnite (UEFN), and it's not standard for Unreal Engine 5.0. It has official documentation explaining what Verse is, but I'd bet it will be updated since it's calling Verse the "scripting language for the Metaverse", a concept that works for the Fortnite-verse branch of Unreal Engine but falls a bit flat when thinking about the future Unreal Engine 6.0.

So that means that if you want to learn Verse right now, the best way is getting into UEFN and start toying around with the language. But if you want an overview, Logan Smith made an amazing video explaining Verse under 30 minutes, introducing one of Verse most interesting feature which is function effects (and making it much easier to me to read and understand the documentation).

What about other scripting languages?

Verse picked my curiosity because it's an agnostic game engine scripting language (not unlike GDScript and GML), but with a unique architecture with its own tradeoffs, seemingly aiming for better ergonomics to make online games easier to make. So it lives in a different design space than GDScript and GML - those are scripting languages that makes programming easier for Godot and GameMaker by featuring a straightforward language-to-engine API and semantics that are similar to other programming languages the developer might have seen such as Python or Lua, while Verse is trying to rethink the language paradigm to better fit the kind of game it wants to build as an agnostic programming language. From the documentation:

"Verse is designed for a future where code runs in a single global simulation—the metaverse. This influences every aspect of the language, from its strong compatibility guarantees to its effect system that tracks side effects and ensures safe concurrent execution."

Again, calling it Metaverse seems a bit boring but it's easy to think about it as online games in general, and Epic has plans to expand Verse beyond Unreal Engine (how is yet to be specified), so between a general purpose scripting language like Lua and an engine-specific scripting language like GDScript, I'd say Verse fits right in the middle but with interesting feature twists.

Game Engine Hubs

As Game Engines become more complex, the need arises for a tool to handle multiple projects using different versions, common plugins, manage project samples, etc. Unity Hub is probably the most famous one, along with the Epic Launcher for the Unreal Engine. But other Game Engines are also growing older with multiple stable versions to manage.

MonoGame Hub

Wait, what is MonoGame anyway?

First a brief history lesson: MonoGame is the spiritual successor of XNA, the Microsoft tools and runtime for game development. You kind of had to be there, but XNA was a big thing for indies back in the day - with Xbox 360 as one of the easiest consoles to ship indie games thanks to Xbox Live, and using home Xbox 360 consoles to test in-development games instead of forcing developers to buy expensive DevKits.

(Screenshot of Indie Game darling FEZ)

The first MonoGame iteration as a framework was a port of XNA to Touch devices like the infamous Windows Phone. XNA Touch soon became MonoGame, and after XNA got discontinued in 2013, MonoGame became one of the standards on creating multiplatform games on the .NET ecosystem, with the same BYOE (Bring Your Own Engine) philosophy as its XNA predecessor: MonoGame itself has a quite friendly API and mostly give developers the tools they need (such as a game loop, cross-platform rendering, input handling, audio, etc) so they can create their own Game Engine on top of it.

15 Years Later...

This was a brief exposition to "other Game Engines are also growing older". MonoGame Foundation, responsible for the 15 years old veteran, announced this week their new MonoGame Hub application, from where developers can more easily create and manage multiple MonoGame projects. From the blog post, the questions MonoGame Hub is looking forward to answering:

• How do I install MonoGame?
• What do I need to install to begin development?
• Where are the sample projects?
• How do I create a new project?

The app itself ships with no dependencies, so developers can check MonoGame resources and have a running project as soon as they download the Hub. Right now, access is limited only to contributors to MonoGame Foundation.

Godot Hub

Coincidentally, this week GameFromScratch covered GodotHub, a new (non-official) hub for the Godot Engine. Technically speaking Godot already comes with a Hub of sorts to manage projects on the same Godot version, but this is a more 'universal' approach for multiple Godot projects using different Godot versions, with other niceties such as template projects and a news feed for Godot news. Godot is only a 12 years old teenager though, so maybe in a couple of years we'll have an official Godot Foundation Hub.

From the Web

• Languages as designed latent spaces. Interesting insight on programming languages and LLM's. The content is less scary than the title.
• i made an aim trainer. An FPS aim trainer with applied cognitive science theory. Also, the website is beautiful and full of squiggles, which improved my reading retention quite a lot.
• Zig by Example. A Zig hands-on introduction using annotated example programs, like Go by Example.
• Everyone should know SIMD. Last week I posted about the Box3D article SIMD for Collision, so now an extensive explanation on how SIMD works.

Human in the Loop

Henrique here.

Just came back from the mythical faraway land of France after watching the official Expedition 33 Concert and drinking a lot of wine.

I'm quite easily moved by good stories, so of course I got really emotional playing and finishing Expedition 33 (and I can't recommend it enough). Watching the concert is quite a different thing though - it evokes the story feelings, themes, and your memories playing it, but now you are a passive listener, so I could put a brave front for the concert. For the first three musics or so. Then I got really emotional and cried.

(it's hard to take a good photo when you're crying)

Expedition 33 is the kind of game I like to think was built peer-pressured by the soundtrack: the music got composed, developers heard it, and then thought "Oh, now we have to make a game as good as the soundtrack", and thus a masterpiece was made. Other games that fit this definition:

• The Sims 1. I love The Sims but I can't get over the fact that the best solo piano soundtrack on a game is called "Building Mode 1".
• Risk of Rain 2. I have the LP of the soundtrack but I don't have a player yet, so sometimes I scratch the LP with my nail and pretend the sound is coming out of my mouth (I don't really do that but if I don't get a record player soon, I will).

Anyway, back to develop the website. I want to add email subscriptions ASAP as an optional way to receive the newsletter. I implemented some bits last week, now I need to finish the bobs. Hopefully it will be done by next week.

See you then!

Missed something?

If you have any suggestions, send me feedback on Mastodon, drop an email at henriquelalves@enginesdatabase.com, or just comment below! And if you want to add a new game engine to the website, consider suggesting a new Game Engine.