Weekly Tech Recap - № 257 - Unreal Engine 5, GitHub Codespaces, AI and basketball, Messenger Rooms, Nvidia DGX A100

Unreal Engine 5

Unreal Engine 5. © Epic Games.

Epic Games unveiled the next generation of its game engine, the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), with an impressive real-time demo running live on PlayStation 5, Sony’s new console due to come out at the end of the year. The two new core technologies that will debut with UE5 are called Nanite and Lumen. Nanite is a geometry virtualizing tool that “frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see”. And Lumen is Epic’s fully dynamic global illumination solution that reacts in real time. The combination of these two technologies produces stunning light, texture and photorealistic rendering, even without ray-tracing. According to Epic, the UE5 will only be fully released at the end of 2021, but developers currently working in UE4 will easily transition. “Epic is designing for forward compatibility, so developers can get started with next-gen development now in UE4 and move projects to UE5 when ready.” The business model is also being revamped, to the delight of developers, who will only start paying the 5% royalty after their gross revenue with any single piece of software exceeds one million dollars. This should allow smaller studios to save tens of thousands of dollars per game. And there are no royalties whatsoever for games sold through Epic’s Game Store.

⇨ YouTube, “Unreal Engine 5 Revealed! | Next-Gen Real-Time Demo Running on PlayStation 5.”

⇨ Unreal Engine, “A first look at Unreal Engine 5.”

⇨ Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech, “Unreal Engine is now royalty-free until a game makes a whopping $1 million.”

⇨ Ars Technica, Kyle Orland, “How Epic got such amazing Unreal Engine 5 results on next-gen consoles.”

GitHub Codespaces

© GitHub.

At its virtual Satellite event, GitHub announced the launch of the beta version of Codespaces, providing developers with a complete, cloud-based development environment, based on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code Online editor (in case you missed it, Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018). “Contributing code to a community can be hard. Every repository has its own way of configuring a dev environment, which often requires dozens of steps before you can write any code,” wrote Shanku Niyogi, GitHub’s Product VP, in the press release on GitHub news. “Even worse, sometimes the environment of two projects you are working on conflict with one another. GitHub Codespaces gives you a fully-featured cloud-hosted dev environment that spins up in seconds, directly within GitHub, so you can start contributing to a project right away.” GitHub says that it hasn’t yet finalized the pricing of Codespaces, but that it’ll probably be pay-as-you-go.

⇨ The Register, Tim Anderson, “GitHub Codespaces: VS Code was ‘designed from the get-go’ for this, says Microsoft architect.”

⇨ The GitHub Blog, Shanku Niyogi, “New from Satellite 2020: GitHub Discussions, Codespaces, securing code in private repositories, and more.”

Never miss a hoop again

© Shane Wighton.

Engineer and YouTuber Shane Wighton has developed a basketball hoop that ensures that you never miss a shot. Thanks to robotics and artificial intelligence, the backboard tracks the shot, calculates the angle, and adjusts its position to bounce the ball into the hoop, all this in just 600 milliseconds. The device also includes a facial recognition feature that identifies whether Wighton or his wife is going for the shot. That allows for some unfair and very funny cheating. Of course, a game that you can’t lose does lose some of its fun, but dang, that’s ingenious.

⇨ YouTube, “How I made a robotic basketball hoop that won't let you miss.”

⇨ The Verge, James Vincent, “Never miss a shot again with this robotic basketball hoop.”

Facebook Messenger Rooms

Messenger Rooms. © Facebook.

There is a viable alternative to Zoom and Google Meet: Facebook’s new video chat product, Messenger Rooms, is now available to everyone on both mobile and desktop, the company announced on Thursday. The product is a more feature-rich and expanded version of the existing Facebook Messenger’s video calling function, and it allows up to 50 people to chat on video with no time limit (hallelujah) through either the main Facebook app or through the dedicated Messenger one.

⇨ The Verge, Nick Statt, “Facebook’s 50-person Zoom alternative, Messenger Rooms, is now available.”

Nvidia DGX A100

A100. © Nvidia.

Nvidia is unveiling its next-generation Ampere GPU architecture today. The first GPU to use Ampere will be Nvidia’s new A100, built for scientific computing, cloud graphics, and data analytics. While there have been plenty of rumors around Nvidia’s Ampere plans for GeForce “RTX 3080” cards, the A100 will primarily be used in data centers. The DGX A100 system promises 5 petaflops of performance and various other exceptional features, but all of this performance isn’t going into powering the latest version of Assassin’s Creed (?)… The A100 sports more than 54 billion transistors, making it the world’s largest 7nm processor. “That is basically at nearly the theoretical limits of what’s possible in semiconductor manufacturing today,” explains Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “The largest die the world’s ever made, and the largest number of transistors in a compute engine the world’s ever made.” Systems start at USD199,000, which made it an expensive game of Assassin’s Creed anyway.

⇨ YouTube, “Introducing NVIDIA DGX A100.”

⇨ The Verge, Tom Warren, James Vincent, “Nvidia’s first Ampere GPU is designed for data centers and AI, not your PC.”