Amazon have just released beta 1.20 of their Lumberyard game engine. The release contains over 200 improvements, fixes and features with the biggest features being every day quality of life changes. The lead two features are improved Asset Processor performance as well as performance improvements to the Event Bus system.
Highlight features from the release notes:
Asset Processor
Asset Processor Faster Scanning Mode significantly reduces the time required to analyze the asset cache on startup. This enables Lumberyard to launch more quickly.
Event Bus (EBus) System
EBus performance improvements have reduced the overhead of invoking functions through the EBus API by at least 20% in most cases. Using EBuses to send events between different game systems and components now performs closer to that of calling the event as a raw function call, thus reducing update time.
Audio
Audio has the following new features:
Wwise External Sources – You can now use the Wwise external audio source feature to specify a loose collection of audio files to be played back dynamically.
Note
The Wwise External Sources feature isn’t supported in Wwise LTX.
Audio System Component – You can now perform audio operations at a global scope (as opposed to entity scope).
Input Streaming Support – You can now stream data from a variety of input sources for playback by the audio system. For example, you can play back the audio stream from a video file.
Sound Duration – You can now obtain the duration of a sound at runtime by registering with the
AudioTriggerNotificationBusfunction and overriding theReportDurationInfofunction.Setting the Panning Mode – You can now use the Wwise
SetPanningModemethod to shift panning between speaker mode (60 degrees) and headphone mode (180 degrees).Animation Editor
The Animation Editor has the following new feature:
Interrupting Transitions – You can now interrupt a transition that is in progress with another transition and smoothly blend into the new state. With this feature, you can quickly blend towards a new state without waiting for a transition to complete. A purple line shows the transition being interrupted. A green line shows the new transition in progress. The ability to interrupt a transition is useful when you want to rapidly interrupt a character attack with another attack, or interrupt a jump with a run forward motion.
Mobile
Mobile has the following new feature:
AWS Device Farm Integration – AWS Device Farm can now be used as a deployment target in the Deployment Tool.
PhysX
The PhysX system has the following new features:
PhysX Force Region Component – You can use the PhysX Force Region component to specify a region to apply physical force to entities. The component applies force at each frame to any entity that is in the bounds of the region. For example, if an entity moves into the force region of a sphere, force is applied to the entity.
For more information, see the PhysX Force Region component in the Amazon Lumberyard User Guide.
In Script Canvas, you can obtain the value of the net force exerted on an entity by using the On Calculate Net Force method of the PhysX Force Region Generation Notifications node. This callback is invoked when the force region calculates the net force exerted on an object.
In somewhat belated news, Amazon also released Project N.E.M.O, a complete demo game showcasing how to use slices and script canvas. This is the source of the game data in the video below.