Lumberyard Engine Beta 1.1

 

Launched just last month, today at GDC Amazon announced the first (beta) update, Lumberyard 1.1.  This update has a fairly impressive number of features including:

  • a new component/entity system
  • Substance PBR integration
  • FBX importer
  • mobile support (just ARM8 + iOS devices and the NVidia Shield for now)
  • new Twitch/Chatplay features

For smaller developers the FBX importer is probably the biggest deal, as Lumberyard currently requires you to use Maya or 3D Studio Max plugins to export in a compatible format.  The addition of a stand alone FBX importer opens Lumberyard up to a number of other DCC solutions such as Blender, Cinema4D, etc.

Obviously mobile support is a big deal as well, but it’s extremely limited at this point.  A bit more on that topic:

Lumberyard Beta 1.1 introduces mobile support. In this release, we include support for iOS devices with an A8 or better processor and the Android-based Nvidia Shield. Lumberyard Beta 1.1 uses Apple’s Metal API and leverages their GMEM fast memory to enable you to create high-fidelity iOS visuals. By using Metal and GMEM, Lumberyard enables your game to directly access and push more data to the Apple GPU hardware, so your game can use the latest rendering techniques (e.g. post effects such as depth of field, glow, flares, and color grading). Supporting mobile developers building 3D and connected games is a priority for us and we will continue to expand device support in coming releases.

Obviously in time that will become more mature.  Finally a bit more on the component/entity system:

One of the areas we are focused on with Lumberyard is making the engine extensible by developers without changing engine code. Our new Component Entity system is built to enable easy engine extension with new components. Content creators can drag-and-drop and combine those components into new game objects. They can then make reusable assemblies of Component Entities, which we call “Slices.” Slices can be composed of other nested Slices. Slices can contain scene elements and game logic written in Flow Graph, Lua, or C++. Individual properties of Slices can be overridden, or shared among all copies of a Slice. This approach allows you to lay out generic copies of a Slice in a scene, and then quickly make changes to specific copies.  For example, if you have a Slice that includes a row of street lamps, you could also include broken light bulbs on a select set of those street lamps. Furthermore, changes to the base model can quickly be shared with all copies. The Lumberyard Editor includes rapid drag-and-drop workflows for creating Components and Slices.

Component Palette

 

Pretty solid progress in a short period of time.  For more details read the complete release here.

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