Unity, the world's leading platform for creating and operating real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today released the 2021 Gaming Report: Unity Insights from 2020 and Predicted Trends for 2021, which provides a comprehensive look at how gaming changed for both players and creators one year into the pandemic. With more than 2.8 billion monthly active consumers of content created or operated with Unity solutions, this report represents the largest dataset on COVID-19's impact on gaming. For a free copy of Unity's 2021 Gaming Report, please visit this page.

"It's still too early to tell if changed habits will become the new norm once the pandemic is over, but given our understanding of past player behavior changes, it would be surprising to see many players revert," said Ingrid Lestiyo, Senior VP and General Manager, Operate Solutions, Unity. "In a year where online entertainment content - more than ever - became the cornerstone of social connections for so many when seeking a semblance of normalcy, Unity Operate Solutions was there to provide reliable, scalable solutions that helped keep the experiences connected and players engaged. Our amazing creators are here for that reason, and our mission is to enable them to focus on, and produce more, content with the technology we provide. While the nature of work may have changed for many game studios over the last year, the tools that help to power their success continued to deliver results that kept players happy, and revenue for developers of all sizes growing."

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has forced immediate, profound lifestyle shifts for consumers around the world, many of whom have turned to gaming for much-needed distraction and social connections. According to a new report released today by Unity Technologies, the world's leading platform for creating and operating interactive, real-time 3D (RT3D) content, there has been an increase of nearly 50% in daily active users of HD games due to COVID-19. The report's findings stem from a cross-platform study focused on COVID-19's impact on consumer gaming for the period from January 1 to mid-May 2020 as compared to the same period in 2019, including an analysis of player behaviors in games, and how games have thus far proven to be stable revenue generators during a global economic crisis.

The data in the report was sourced globally from mobile games that deploy Unity's monetization platform as well as games made with Unity for PC and mac OS, Android, and iOS, and Unity's deltaDNA which provides sophisticated player engagement tools for game-makers powered by deep data analytics. Unity Ads are seen by more than 114 million end users every day.

Unity Engine powers a lot of games across platforms. The game engine includes a telemetry module that dials home every few minutes (depending on the game), pushing usage data and crash reports (if any). Some games, such as "Kerbal Space Program," allow you to opt-out from this telemetry, but even then the engine is known to dial home at game startup and at longer intervals, with far less amount of data.

TechPowerUp Forums member by the night and software developer by the day "R-T-B" created a nifty utility that can modify your game to completely strip it off Unity Engine telemetry, called UnityAnalyticsKiller. "Stop spying on my kerbals," reads the utility's GitHub page, describing UnityAnalyticsKiller as a game library replacement along with a ReadMe with some basic instructions. You can also inspect its source and build it by yourself if you're curious. R-T-B invites gamers and developers to test the utility and offer feedback in the TechPowerUp Forums thread here.

DOWNLOAD: UnityAnalyticsKiller by R-T-B

If you've heard of Teslasuit, you've likely felt some sort of interest towards it. As well you should: the ideal of a full body suit with haptic feedback for VR experiences is enough for some of us - at least those with the hero, "I'll never get hit by any bullet" complex. Add to the full body haptic feedback capabilities such as full body motion tracking embedded into the suit, as well as localized temperature controls for transmitting heat and cold sensations, and... There's also biometric feedback built in for usage patterns and engagement ratio, to aid developers in their data collecting. Well, can I hear Ready Player One, anyone?

The company behind the Tesla suit have just announced that their product won the Red Dot: Best of the Best, the top distinction in the competition. It is granted for groundbreaking design and goes to the best products in a category. The Teslasuit is now available for distribution as a development kit, and features dedicated software, documentation, API integration with Unreal Engine, Unity, and Motion Builder.

Unity has grown from a relatively simple engine to one of the most flexible options available for developers, allowing everything from 2D platformers to 3D games and short cinematics, all rendered in real-time, in-engine. The new Heretic real-time demo, showcased at GDC 2019, is one such example of a 3D engine being used to render a breathtaking cinematic.

The Heretic builds upon learnings derived from both the Adam and Book of the Dead shorts, and take advantage of the latest technologies embedded into the Unity engine. Motion blur, bloom, depth of field, film grain, color grading, and Panini projection, including by real-time lights and usage of a probe-based lighting solution. Just take a look at the video yourself, right after the break, and read on for the other part of this Unity-related piece: the Megacity Tech Demo.

NVIDIA had their customary GTC keynote ending mere minutes ago, and it was one of the longer keynotes clocking in at nearly three hours in length. There were some fascinating demos and features shown off, especially in the realm of robotics and machine learning, as well as new hardware as it pertains to AI and cars with the all-new Jetson Nano. It would be fair to say, however, that the vast majority of the keynote was targeting developers and researchers, as usually is the case at GTC. However, something came up in between which caught us by surprise, and no doubt is a pleasant update to most of us here on TechPowerUp.

Following AMD's claims on software-based real-time ray tracing in games, and Crytek's Neon Noir real-time ray tracing demo for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, it makes sense in hindsight that NVIDIA would allow rudimentary DXR ray tracing support to older hardware that do not support RT cores. In particular, an upcoming drivers update next month will allow DXR support for 10-series Pascal-microarchitecture graphics cards (GTX 1060 6 GB and higher), as well as the newly announced GTX 16-series Turing-microarchitecture GPUs (GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Ti). The announcement comes with a caveat letting people know to not expect RTX support (think lower number of ray traces, and possibly no secondary/tertiary effects), and this DXR mode will only be supported in Unity and Unreal game engines for now. More to come, with details past the break.

Neil Blomkamp is one of today's most well-regarded sci-fi filmmakers - and for good reason. While you may know him for his feature-length films (such as the legendary District 9 and the even more legendary, for me, Elysium), he has been making forays into conceptual filmmaking ever since he set up Oats Studios. The goal for Oats Studios was to create cinematographic thought-experiments with a sci-fi twist, and the studios have released a number of great works that you can follow on their YouTube (such as Zygote, Firebase, and Rakka), even going so far as to fully experiment with the power of Unity in the making of some seriously impressive pieces in their Adam series. If you don't know the studio's work yet, do yourself a favor and take a look.

That said, EA and Bioware have clearly picked up on the potential for Oats Studios, and ordered a cinematic, live-action story set on the Anthem universe. Named Conviction, the short serves as a teaser for the games' release, and showcases the impressive world of Anthem being brought to life with real people and settings. I won't dive into much detail here; I've given you the background. Suffice it to say that I am left even more wanting in regards to Neil Blomkamp's canceled Halo project after watching this. I bet you'd love to see something such as this brought to life in more detail and depth than a short three minutes and forty-five seconds allow for.

In June 2016 Valve announced 'Destinations', a Steam workshop not easy to find anymore, that allowed the end user to enter real and fictitious scenarios through the magic of virtual reality. The idea was intriguing, but the media was not completely sold and judged Valve's proposal as both "the best and the worst of VR". From all this, however, came a singular discovery: those who reverse-engineered its code discovered in it the HLVR acronym, which initiated a wide debate about the potential appearance of a Half Life VR (HLVR) version specifically developed for VR headsets.

Lending further credence to this hypothesis was Gabe Newell's announcement in February 2017 that Valve was preparing three big titles for virtual reality- two of them based on Source 2, and one of them based on Unity. More such signs appeared in the summer of 2018, and everything was pointing towards this project being indeed real, that it would likely be based on Source 2, and that it would offer a full-fledged blockbuster title that this generation of VR has been desperately seeking. We now have more data courtesy a "leaked email" to Reddit user 2flock that suggests Valve's work is apparently going beyond just VR game development, as images of a prototype device seen below confirm that Valve is also working on its own VR head-mounted display (HMD), one whose development would also be more advanced than initially suspected.

HaptX today announced that they're opening availability of development kits for their HaptX haptic feedback VR Gloves. The development kits include a pair of HaptX gloves - each featuring 130 tactile actuators that provide realistic touch across the hand and fingertips, with full tactile displacement of objects, size, and weight feedback. Built with HaptX's patented microfluidic technology, HaptX Gloves also deliver powerful force feedback and industry-leading motion tracking with sub-millimeter precision.

The HaptX gloves and accompanying software are already supported in unity and Unreal Engine 4 - two of the most widespread games development engines - which should allow for increased chances of market integration towards VR experiences. Bringing the physical to the visual is the motto here, and there's a world of potential to be achieved.

The present is likely a result of Telltale Games' vertiginous rise as a developer of single-player experiences - and their precipitous fall afterwards. As telltale Games has had to restructure its studio team by laying off some 25% of its workforce not that long ago, its seems the company has decided to cut its losses on a tool that arguably made their name and fame: their in-house engine.

Development costs have only gone up as the need for more detailed animations and assets has increased developers' graphics development costs, and Telltale had been working with an engine it had been continually building upon since 2005. however, the fact remains that the engine was showing its age - and gripping its teeth at performance - for the last few games the studio developed. In the end, the studio must have decided that in the face of the reduced workforce, games development and engine engineering were too much at the same time, and naturally decided to cut the latter.

While the Unity Engine isn't one used for cutting-edge triple-A releases, its workflow is considered by many to be one of the most scalable and platform-adaptable there is. The engine can be scaled all the way from 2D, text-based mobile games all the way towards 3D, VR presentations, which makes it a popular choice - particularly, to Indie studios. A slight sideline here as NVYVE Studio's P.A.M.E.L.A. is powered by Unity, and I have high hopes for that one piece of 3D interactivity.

According to Nvidia, adding VRWorks to titles created with the Unity Engine will now be significantly easier thanks to the recently released Unity 2017.1.0 Beta 2. Unity now doubles down as one of the most popular game engines for VR development (SuperHot VR was powered by it, for example), with Nvidia also stating that the Unity Engine is an important tool for other interactive experiences such as film, medical, tourism, design, education, and training, as well, proving the engine's versatility. As to VRWorks, it functions much like GameWorks: it's a suite of developer tools, APIs, libraries, and engines that are now available as a plugin in the Unity 2017.1.b2 update. Nvidia said that this provides developers an easy path to taking advantage of the SDK in their games and VR experiences. Namely, Unity Engine now includes plugins for Nvidia VRWorks technologies such as Multi-Res Shading, Lens Matched Shading, Single Pass Stereo, and VR SLI, and you can download the latest Beta version of the engine right from NVIDIA.

At its WX call, AMD focused on shifts in creativity from traditional design flows such as Solidworks, Adobe and Autodesk towards game engines as solutions for design visualization (Unreal Engine, Unity, CryEngine, or Autodesk's own Stingray platform), which signal changes in the creator ecosystem. Thanks to globalization, the Internet, and the available wealth of knowledge one can access through it, the line between amateurs and professionals is becoming more and more blurred. Now, those who would once be called amateurs are also using professional tools, and AMD plans to be at the forefront of technologies empowering creators to deliver their vision.

Radeon PRO serves to give creators more flexible and powerful solutions, leveraging open-source resources and centering the ecosystem back on creators and the tools they choose to use, with focused support on VR. As such, AMD is giving them the tools they need, by introducing three new products featuring the Polaris architecture, including 3 year standard + 7 year free extended warranty (including components such as the PCB itself, the PCI-Express slot, and the heatsinks), with AMD taking that extra 7 years as company commitment towards the quality of their products. Those three products are the WX4100, the WX5100, and the WX7100, and have planned, staggered availability throughout November.

AMD today announced its collaboration with Mixamo on the launch of Face Plus, an advanced real-time motion capture and 3D facial animation technology for the Unity game engine (v4.3). Mixamo, an AMD Ventures portfolio company, provides online 3D animation service for game developers.

Mixamo's Face Plus plug-in for Unity is designed to enable developers to capture their facial expressions through standard webcams and transfer them in real time onto a 3D character using technology powered by AMD A-Series APUs and GPUs. This real-time capture and animation capability is made possible by offloading Mixamo's innovative and complex algorithms from the CPU onto AMD's industry-leading GPU technology.

Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity multi-platform engine and development tools, is proud to announce Unity 4.0 is now available for download. Unity 4, announced in June, will consist of a series of updates designed to improve the product through an extensive improvement of existing tech and the rollout of new features. The first in a series of updates for Unity 4, this version includes significant additions such as DirectX 11 support and Mecanim animation tools. In addition users will have access to a Linux deployment preview and the Adobe Flash Player deployment add-on.

"Unity 4 will see the addition of an incredible number of new, highly advanced, features and continuous improvement across the tech to be released in smaller, faster increments than Unity has seen in the past," said David Helgason, CEO, Unity Technologies. "It's an exciting time for Unity and the 4.0 release marks the beginning of a great new era for our technology."

Rambus Inc., one of the world's premier technology licensing companies, today announced it has acquired privately-held Unity Semiconductor, an innovative memory technology company for an aggregate of $35 million in cash. As part of this acquisition, the Unity team members have joined Rambus to continue developing innovations and solutions for next-generation non-volatile memory. This acquisition will expand the breadth of Rambus' breakthrough memory technologies and will open up new markets for licensing. The boards of directors of both companies have approved the acquisition and it has closed.