Programming breakthroughs occur at an extremely rapid rate. Here are three advancements in programming and video game development from this year.
1 Dueling Neural Networks
Arguably the most powerful technology in the article, duelling neural networks are where two different AIs are used in tandem to produce staggering results. One AI is trained to create something, say a picture of a person, while another AI is trained to accurately detect a person. Then, the first AI will create hundreds of faces and the best ones are accepted by the second AI. This technology, although fairly simple, can lead to very impressive creations, such as authentic machine generated text messages, and even paintings which seem to be created by a master painter which are actually created by computers.
2 Augmented Reality Plugins for Android Studio
With increased popularity, comes increasing demand. Over the past year, augmented reality games have exploded in popularity (likely due to the unprecedented success of Pokémon Go) and consequently they’re becoming easier to program. There is now an abundance of first and third party plugins to facilitate programming augmented reality games in Android Studio. This means that you can program augmented reality games for the huge market of Google Play with relative ease.
3 New Pipe-lining Tools
2018 has seen a huge number of new processors with even more CPU cores — most notably Intel and AMD’s recent offerings. As a result, the video gaming industry has been trying to keep up to make it easier to multi-thread and pipeline applications. Unity’s newest update has support for multi-threaded graphics processing, which means that it will be easier to program video games that take advantage of the newest most powerful processors. Similar advancements are also happening when it comes to software development suites, and many programming languages’ multi-thread libraries are being expanded to make it easier to program pipelines and applications that run smoother on the latest generation of processors.