Unity has had a rough year. The company was caught up in a firestorm of criticism in September of last year when it announced a runtime fee that would charge developers a fee every time a Unity game was installed. Even well before the fee showed up, Unity had dug itself so deep in the community of game developers that it’s spent over a year trying to get back to the positive reputation it once maintained — and the work still isn’t done, even after a new CEO and the full-out cancellation of its runtime fee.
But this week, Unity is hoping to turn things around with Unity 6 being released — the first numbered Unity update in nearly a decade. Last year, Unity 6 represented a growing pillar of game development that was trying to make a quick grab at cash. But now, it represents a rightfully battered company that’s trying to win back some favor. And in order to do that, it needs a damn good game to show off its new tech. That game is Den of Wolves.
It’s the latest title from GTFO developer 10 Chambers Collective, which was formed from developers who worked on Payday and Payday 2. It’s also one of the first games to commit to using the new Unity 6 engine, despite the fact that 10 Chambers started work on an older version of Unity. I spoke with Hjalmar Vikström, co-founder of 10 Chambers, and Ryan Ellis, VP of Product at Unity, to understand what the new engine brings and the outlook from developers on everything from game optimization to generative AI.
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If you’ve played GTFO, it’s probably surprising that the game was built on Unity. It doesn’t look like a Unity game, which is something Vikström acknowledged almost immediately.
“So many people were so surprised when they saw us, when we announced GTFO, and they’re like, ‘What? Unity?’” Vikström told me. “That hasn’t been the case like in Unity, you get the beautiful games. It’s always been Unreal, you know.”
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Right, Unreal Engine. For more than a decade at this point, you thought of a big console and PC release as an Unreal game, while Unity was for indies and a flood of mobile titles (some better than others) taking up space in the App Store. Vikström even shared that the team was approached by Unreal reps after originally showing off the GTFO trailer, shocked that the company wasn’t using Unreal Engine or its own tech.
He recognized that Den of Wolves has become some sort of poster child for the new engine.
The obvious question: why? “Unity is much quicker for us. It’s quicker to iterate on. It’s, you know, you can create a small, empty project and do a simple prototype with boxes and things, and then, like, this is what I’m thinking. And it takes a couple of seconds to reload everything.”
It’s that lightweight, multiplatform approach that originally brought 10 Chambers to the engine. Although 10 Chambers has a team nearly 100 people now, and ambitions of a team with multiple hundred people, the collective started as a group of four or five former co-workers. For them, Unity represented a way to quickly get their vision up and running as team members wore multiple hats across programming and game design.
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The negatives attributes that have been associated with Unity in the past were actually a positive for the team.
“The nice thing is that Unity’s base level performance, like an empty project, doesn’t have that much overhead. It’s quite cheap,” Vikström said. “It’s actually one of the benefits of them also being on mobile, and, you know, even web browser games. They can’t have a clunky, huge-ass default project because, when you start a new thing, it needs to be super slim to be able to run on anything, basically.”
Call of Duty Mobile was built using Unity.Tushar Mehta / Digital Trends
Vikström wasn’t shy about the spin of Unity 6, especially given the past year of troubles the company has faced. He recognized that Den of Wolves has become some sort of poster child for the new engine, and even went as far as to say that he didn’t “want to sound like a Unity shill.” And to that end, Vikström described some of the issues the team has come up against with Unity in the past.
“I mean, it’s a ton of work, like our struggles with physics in old versions of Unity. I don’t know how many months I’ve spent on physics optimizations in Unity,” he said. “It’s just a lot of work, but you can, you know, if you know your s**t, you can get it done.”
Although Unity made sense for a small group of developers working on their first game under a new studio, it didn’t mean that the team had to necessarily go with Unity 6 for Den of Wolves. Some changes in the latest version of the engine made it a more more compelling offering, however.
There’s no denying that GTFO is a beautiful game, and it looks like Den of Wolves will be equally as impressive. For GTFO, the visual accomplishments were despite using Unity as the underlying engine, not because of it. Vikström highlighted the modularity of Unity as one of its strong suits, and how the team swapped out the default rendering pipeline in GTFO for its own tech. Now, the team is using what you get out of the box.
“The HDRP, you know, it’s come a long way now. We didn’t go with that for GTFO because it was too immature,” Vikström said. “One of the main reasons for switching to Unity 6 — because we didn’t obviously start on Unity 6 because we’ve been developing for a bit — it’s because of the visuals, you know? And that’s quite a strong statement, actually, for a Unity game.”
The Unreal renderer is why you associate so many beautiful games with the engine. Although Unity has plenty of flexibility, its rendering pipeline hasn’t been the best in the past. It started with URP, or the Universal Render Pipeline, but Unity 6 has HDRP, or the High Definition Rendering Pipeline.
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It includes advanced shaders for subsurface scattering and translucency, ray tracing and path tracing, volumetric fog and clouds, and a fully open pipeline that developers can rewrite in the engine’s native language, C#. And for 10 Chambers, the maturing of the rendering has made a world of difference.
10 Chambers
It’s not just a matter of throwing more tech at the problem. Vikström held ground that the new pipeline wasn’t a solution to instantly make a game look better. “I think it comes down to artistic choices more than cutting-edge tech,” the developer told me. “You need to make some choices. You can’t just say it’s gonna look hyper realistic, you know, because then you’re competing with everything trying to be hyper realistic. And then, especially in earlier versions of Unity, you were not in for a good time.”
The maturing of the rendering pipeline makes a big difference, but Ellis highlighted some specifics that make Unity 6 tick. “We made some very, very significant graphics improvements in Unity 6 overall. An example of that is a new capability, which is called GPU resident drawer, which essentially offloads things that work on the CPU to the GPU. We’ve seen improvements of up to four times in the CPU performance just by essentially toggling this thing on,” the Unity executive told me.
There are some other new additions, like Spatial Temporal Post-Processing, or STP, which looks like Unity’s take on the Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) feature in Unreal Engine 5. There’s also GPU occlusion culling, which calls objects out of the game world that aren’t visible — once again, a feature available in Unreal Engine. Unity may be known for mobile and indie releases, but it’s clear with Unity 6 that the engine is trying to scale up.
I’m sure all of the changes in Unity 6 are great for developers, and I know that Unreal Engine has plenty of its own draw, as well. That’s great for game developers to duke it out with each other about which is better, but I’m not a game developer (and I suspect most people reading this aren’t, either). I moved on from the engine itself to one of the most pressing questions still on the mind of PC gamers — optimization.
I’ve previously spoken with developers about the optimization problem on PC, but even more than a year later, the issues persist, particularly with Unreal Engine releases — Silent Hill 2 comes to mind as a recent example. Surprisingly, Vikström didn’t point to the engine when talking about performance issues. I asked if 10 Chambers’ humble beginnings helped when it came to optimizing GTFO, and the developer didn’t mince words: “Yep, 100%.”
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“It’s quite easy to do when you’re two programmers. We could just decide to do [optimization] and then we start doing it. But you still need to have that mindset of, you cannot have a underperforming shooter, right?”
The typical answer to the optimization problem is this — there are just too many hardware configurations on PC. That’s true, but Vikström focused more on the practical issues that come up when trying to optimize a big game across an even larger team.
10 Chambers / X
“You just need to be at it. Spend time of it. You know, do the work on it,” Vikström said. “And I 100% understand why that is super hard on, like, a 500, 1,000-person team, because who owns that? Who makes 200 artists change their art? Or, like, ‘hey, you can’t do your shadow meshes like this.’ Hopefully in good studios you can get that done, but otherwise, it’s quite easy to lose that ownership.”
It’s a reality that game developers are well aware of but game players rarely consider. Particularly with large teams, work is often very siloed. You don’t have a creative, freeform environment where every programmer knows every artist, all of whom talk with designers. There are different departments, all of which need to work together to optimize a game. If a game is too heavy, that has implications for programmers, artists, and game designers, and it’s not as simple as waving a wand to mobilize hundreds of people to upend all the work they’ve put in.
Even with that executive dysfunction, Vikström recognized that optimizing a game for PC is just straight-up hard. “Optimization, we’re super passionate about it, but it’s hard. I mean, it’s super hard. But we’re still at the size where we can actually go, ‘hey artists, we need to change the shadow meshes,’ or ‘hey programmers, we need to optimize thread management.’ And that gives me a lot of hope because it’s just weeks and months of work.”
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Still, Vikström says the team at 10 Chambers is committed to the process. “I’m not saying Den of Wolves will be, out of the gate in early access, the best-optimized game. It won’t be because, you know, that s**t is hard. We can’t allow any stuttering, or texture loading, or, you know, these CPU spikes. We want to get rid of them.”
Optimization is one of the big topics in gaming today, but the other one is AI. In particular, generative AI. Generative AI has already displaced the jobs of game developers, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. According to Vikström and Ellis, it’s a topic that has to be approached with nuance because, like it or not, AI isn’t going anywhere in game development.
“We really believe that the creator needs to be at the center of all these things, and that AI is purely there to help provide assistance,” Ellis told me. “We’ve seen some incredible things that people can create with AI, and yet they also seem to lack a soul, or some sort of real spark of creativity. And in the gaming world, so much of this is about that spark.”
It’s great to hear that an executive recognizes the creativity required to make a game work, but Vikström, who’s working in the trenches of game development, pointed to some more practical examples. With a background in programming, the developer specifically called out repetitive tasks, such as writing boilerplate code — foundational code that can be reused across several different scenarios.
Like it or not, AI isn’t going anywhere in game development.
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“I’ve done this 10 times before, but it was a year ago now, so I don’t remember the boilerplate code for it. I just asked, like, ChatGPT or something, ‘Hey, I need a boilerplate for opening a window, aligning three buttons.’ It’s not hard programming, but it would just take an hour to get there because you need to find the right boilerplate for it. So that saved me, you know, a couple of hours, which was great.”
The other area of impact is art — and that’s where we’ve seen displacement, particularly with 2D artists at Activision Blizzard. Vikström says that generative AI is useful for visual ideation, but that you really need to be an artist to use these tools in the first place.
“It’s not really concept art, but it’s more like, ‘this is the look we’re kind of going for,’” Vikström said. “You need to be artistically-minded to see those qualities… You can be totally unartistic and get a nice-looking image, but you don’t know what you’re looking at. Like, what is good about this image? So, you still need to be artistic.”
There’s not an easy answer to the AI question in game development, as even developers themselves are unsure how to properly (and creatively) leverage the tools. And there’s no way we’ve seen the end executives trying to automate away jobs that were once filled by people. It’s also clear that generative AI is extremely powerful as a tool for game development, and hopefully over time, it’ll make for better games — and a few lost jobs are possible.
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Ellis summed up the AI point nicely: “You see these titles come from an indie creator who maybe didn’t have a whole lot of money, but they came up with this beautiful idea or approach that just feels novel and unique, and it can take off like wildfire. And, we don’t see those things as being things that AI can create.”
There’s a certain level of fandom you hit when you research a band’s tour set list before they come to your city. And some of us like to relive great concerts with some quick research on setlist.fm. The next logical step, once we’re armed with this information, is to create a playlist on our preferred streaming service for quick access. Thanks to third-party options like Setify, the process is easy for Apple Music and Spotify users, but you still have to take the time to do it.
Apple Music has now given artists the ability to turn set lists into playlists thanks to info from tour info site Bandsintown. Once an artist has connected the two services, they can select the type of show in Apple Music for Artists (concert, tour or residency) and link it to upcoming dates on Bandsintown. From there, artists can set a publish date and use search to build out the playlist. These collections of songs can include original tunes the artist covers or collaborations with other acts. Apple Music allows unlimited set list playlists for past or future shows, but the service recommends that artists select a track listing that most accurately reflects the whole tour if they’re making one for an entire run of dates.
Set lists playlists aren’t entirely new on Apple Music. The service has been curating playlists for popular tours for a while now, like Zach Bryan’s 2024 Quittin’ Time Tour. What’s more, Apple Music is touting this new tool as a promotional feature for artists, so there are a number of ways to share the playlists once they’re live. However, it will also be a great item for fans who either want more info on the songs they can expect to hear, can’t make it to a stop on a tour or want to relive the experience of seeing the band in person.
Of course, if one of your favorites doesn’t hop on this bandwagon, you still have options for set list playlists. With Setify, you can link either Apple Music or Spotify and pull in data from setlist.fm in order to make your collections. It’s not perfect, but it works well most of the time, and you can always adjust things in the streaming service apps if you need to further curate a playlist. I recently missed one of my all-time favorites at Furnace Fest, but thanks to this combo, I can at least get a small piece of Blindside playing through About a Burning Fire.
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Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
Your Strands expert
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Your Strands expert
Marc McLaren
NYT Strands today (game #232) – hint #1 – today’s theme
What is the theme of today’s NYT Strands?
• Today’s NYT Strands theme is… We’re in this together
NYT Strands today (game #232) – hint #2 – clue words
Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.
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TONGS
SCOUR
COLD
HIDE
POLE
POUR
NYT Strands today (game #232) – hint #3 – spangram
What is a hint for today’s spangram?
• Strength in numbers
NYT Strands today (game #232) – hint #4 – spangram position
What are two sides of the board that today’s spangram touches?
First: left, 5th row
Last: right, 5th row
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
NYT Strands today (game #232) – the answers
(Image credit: New York Times)
The answers to today’s Strands, game #232, are…
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PACK
HERD
FLOCK
SWARM
SCHOOL
PRIDE
KNOT
COLONY
SPANGRAM: GROUPNAME
My rating: Easy
My score: Perfect
Sadly, today’s Strands didn’t include my favorite collective noun: a prickle of porcupines. I’m also partial to a conspiracy of lemurs. Aren’t they great! But it did include a KNOT (of snakes) among the far more prosaic likes of PACK, HERD, FLOCK and SWARM.
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This was a pretty simple Strands all told, but a fun one too. The most difficult part of it, as is often the case, was getting started, but once I was underway the answers all spilled out of my brain fairly quickly.
Yesterday’s NYT Strands answers (Sunday, 20 October, game #231)
OTTOMAN
RECLINER
TABLE
SOFA
FIREPLACE
SHELF
SPANGRAM: LIVING ROOM
What is NYT Strands?
Strands is the NYT’s new word game, following Wordle and Connections. It’s now out of beta so is a fully fledged member of the NYT’s games stable and can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
I’ve got a full guide to how to play NYT Strands, complete with tips for solving it, so check that out if you’re struggling to beat it each day.
NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick is preparing to fly home aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at the end of the seven-month Crew-8 mission, but he recently found time to snap an incredible night shot featuring the Nile River, the Nile Delta, Cairo, and beyond.
“Moonlight illuminates Cairo and the Mediterranean on a mostly clear night,” Dominick wrote in a message accompanying the photo that was shared on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday.
“We were up late last night sleep shifting in preparation for undocking and return to Earth in the next few days,” Dominick continued. “Cairo at night is one of my favorite views. I am happy the timing worked out to see it one more time before we depart.”
Moonlight illuminates Cairo and the Mediterranean on a mostly clear night.
We were up late last night sleep shifting in preparation for undocking and return to Earth in the next few days. Cairo at night is one of my favorite views. I am happy the timing worked out to see it one… pic.twitter.com/zLmVozPvfL
Captured from 250 miles above Earth, Dominick used a 50mm lens set at f1.2, 1/10 second, and ISO 3200. He doesn’t specify the camera body but going by his earlier work, it’s likely to have been a Nikon Z9.
Dominick, on his first missions to space, has been wowing fans with some incredible imagery taken during his seven months aboard the orbital outpost. But this latest shot must be one of his finest night images yet.
The American astronaut is making final preparations with three other astronauts for the return journey to Earth. The voyage has already been delayed due to poor weather conditions in the splashdown zone off the coast of Florida.
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NASA said on Sunday that there had been “a marginal improvement in forecast weather conditions in potential splashdown sites off the coast of Florida for the return of the Crew-8 mission,” adding that Crew-8 is currently targeting undocking from the ISS no earlier than 9:05 p.m. ET on Monday, October 21. It added that the earliest splashdown opportunity for the Crew Dragon spacecraft is about 12:55 p.m. ET on Tuesday, October 22.
Update 10/17/24 11:05am ET: Amazon has raised the price of the 55-inch model by $100, which brings the final price down to $1,297. While not quite as low as it was just a few hours ago, that’s still about $500 off the original price and a good deal.
I don’t know about you but I will be spending most of the upcoming cold months sitting on my couch and watching television (with some books thrown in). The only thing I’m missing is a really good television set and, while I’ll be opting for a more budget-friendly pick, I’m tempted by the sale on LG’s C3 Series OLED TV. Right now, the 55-inch model is down to $1,197 from $1,800 — a 34 percent discount. The all-time low price isn’t the only version on sale, with the 42-inch option dropping to $997 from $1,197.
LG released the C3 series last year as a mid-range OLED option. It offers an a9 AI Processor Gen6, HDR tone mapping, AI upscaling and object-based picture sharpening. The TVs also come with Brightness Booster, which — though not to the level of some of its competitors — makes it easier to watch even in a relatively sunny room.
LG
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If you want the newest model then check out LG’s C4 OLED series. The 2024 release is also on sale, with the 55-inch version down to $1,297 from $2,000 — the same 35 percent discount we recently saw on Prime Day. The C4 TVs offer nearly 1,000 nits of brightness and a maximum refresh rate of 144Hz. This model will also wirelessly connect with LG soundbars, foregoing the need for messy cables.
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Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need clues.
I’m not sure whether others will find this quite as difficult as I did, but I made an early mistake and was slightly worried about my streak – which is admittedly only at six, but hey you have to take what you can in this game.
The problem for me was that the easiest group, KINDS OF BEANS, contained one I didn’t know, NAVY; in the UK, where I am, these are instead called haricot beans. I spotted that PINTO, KIDNEY and MUNG all clearly went together but guessed LIVER as the fourth (I think I was confused with LIMA) and when that was wrong didn’t really know what to do next.
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So I moved on, and found the green ATTRACT group, then the actually-fairly-easy blue AUTOMATIC GEAR SHIFTER POSITIONS group. Revisiting ‘beans’ with a smaller pool of words I vaguely recalled a mention of NAVY beans in some movie or other so played that and got it right. That meant I didn’t need to solve the purple __POOL group, which is just as well as I had no clue about that one.
YELLOW: BIT OF NEWSPAPER WRITING ARTICLE, COLUMN, FEATURE, STORY
BLUE: TABLE TENNIS NEEDS BALL, NET, PADDLE, TABLE
PURPLE: HOMOPHONES OF COORDINATING CONJUNCTIONS BUTT, FORE, OAR, SEW
What is NYT Connections?
NYT Connections is one of several increasingly popular word games made by the New York Times. It challenges you to find groups of four items that share something in common, and each group has a different difficulty level: green is easy, yellow a little harder, blue often quite tough and purple usually very difficult.
On the plus side, you don’t technically need to solve the final one, as you’ll be able to answer that one by a process of elimination. What’s more, you can make up to four mistakes, which gives you a little bit of breathing room.
It’s a little more involved than something like Wordle, however, and there are plenty of opportunities for the game to trip you up with tricks. For instance, watch out for homophones and other word games that could disguise the answers.
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It’s playable for free via the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
The thriller genre is consistently entertaining, and Amazon Prime Video has some of the best movie picks in this department. The platform’s library has everything adrenaline junkies would want, from all-time classics to contemporary hits. Prime Video’s thrillers are also diverse, including sci-fi thrillers, high-octane action, dystopian thrillers, and everything in between.
Movies like the Daniel Craig-led No Time to Die and the Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambsare among this month’s highlights. While the depth of the service’s catalog can be intimidating, this monthly updated guide highlights some of the best thriller movies on Prime Video right now.
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