Lumberyard Beta 1.15 Available

Amazon has presented Lumberyard Beta 1.15 which brings a number of new features.

Amazon has presented Lumberyard Beta 1.15 which brings new River and Road components, Cloud Gems for Cloud Canvas, Blend nodes for the Animation Editor, Shader Compiler support for MacOS, and more. Let’s study the update. 

Lumberyard 1.15 adds the following components:

River – Use this component to carve riverbeds into the terrain and fill the riverbeds with moving water. The River component uses 2D materials to create the illusion of flowing water. Optimally, you should use this component to create flat rivers along level terrain. For more information, see the River component in the Amazon Lumberyard User Guide.

Example animated gif of the River component in Lumberyard Editor.

Road – Use this component to create paths in the terrain. You can create roads that follow the curvature of existing terrain by applying a texture over the terrain texture. You can also use the Align heightmap feature with the Road component to shape the terrain to the height and curvature of the road you placed. For more information, see the Road component in the Amazon Lumberyard User Guide.

Example image of a path created by the Road component in Lumberyard Editor.

New Cloud Gems for Cloud Canvas

Lumberyard 1.15 introduces the following cloud gems:

Metrics, Analytics, and Heatmaps

You can use this cloud gem to collect event-driven data on player behaviors for analysis or to trigger event actions. This gem follows a serverless, microservice architecture and deploys an event ingestion pipeline, query engine, telemetry dashboard, and heatmaps.

Defect Reporter

You can use this cloud gem to allow QA engineers, testers, and players to tag locations and assets in-game to report defects. The Defect Reporter captures player and session data at the time of submission, attaches a screenshot to the report, and prompts the player for additional information. You can review and query submissions in the Defect Reporter Cloud Gem Portal plugin. Raw data is stored in Amazon S3, so you can import the data with standard data warehousing and analytics tools.

Compute Farm

This cloud gem uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and a divide-and-conquer algorithm to increase the speed of computationally-intensive tasks. An example is included to show how you can use the gem to sort the words in a dictionary. You can customize the example to perform tasks such as generating large world terrain or static light maps.

Web Communicator

You can use this gem to notify game clients and servers of important events. AWS IoT is used to send notifications to connected game clients or servers, rather than the game clients or servers polling for updates. With cross-gem communication, you can use the Web Communicator Cloud Gem in combination with other cloud gems. For example, you can use the Player Account Cloud Gem to remove the scores of players who are banned from the Leaderboard Cloud Gem, or the Dynamic Content Cloud Gem to notify game clients when new content is available.

For more information about Cloud Canvas and these cloud gems, see Implementing Connected Features with Cloud Canvas and Cloud Gems in the Amazon Lumberyard User Guide.

New Tutorial: 5 Time-saving Cloud Gems

Watch the following video tutorial to learn about five useful Cloud Gems for your game project:

  • Text to Speech

  • Defect Reporter

  • Game Metrics

  • Dynamic Content

  • Compute Farm

  • Blend Nodes for the Animation Editor

    The EMotionFX Animation Editor helps artists build and animate complex character behavior. The Animation Editor includes visual tools to set up hierarchical state machines, logic, and advanced hierarchical blend trees.

    Lumberyard 1.15 adds the following nodes:

  • Hub node – Reduces the complexity of transitions by acting as a pass-through node. The Hub node outputs the pose of the node that transitioned into the Hub node.

  • Blend Two Additive node – Blends a base pose and an additive pose, for example Pose2 on top of the Pose1 input.

  • Pose Subtract node – Subtracts one pose from another, for example Pose2 from Pose1.

  • Blend Two node – Maintains previous functionality, but no longer supports Additive Blend mode.

  • Blend Two (Legacy) node – Provides backward compatibility for legacy functionality.

  • New blend nodes in the Anim Graph Palette in the Lumberyard Animation Editor.

    The Animation Editor also supports saving assets in binary or text-based formats. This allows you to more easily merge your data.

    For more information, see Animation Editor (EMotionFX) in the Amazon Lumberyard User Guide.

    Shader Compiler Support for macOS

    You are no longer required to use a Windows-based computer to generate Metal shaders for iOS and macOS. Lumberyard 1.15 adds a shader cross-compiler that is based on the Microsoft DirectX Shader Compiler and supported on Windows and macOS. The shader cross-compiler converts high-level shading language (HLSL) shaders to Metal.

    You can enable or disable the shader compiler by setting the r_ShadersUseLLVMDirectXCompiler console variable in the system_ios_ios.cfg file. iOS and macOS now use this shader compiler by default.

    The remote shader compiler (CrySCompileServer) has the following updates:

    • macOS is now supported.

    • The shader request protocol now specifies the compiler to use and the target OS. This prevents collisions between the cached shaders that are requested for different compilers or operating systems.

    • Shader requests are now received for the new shader compiler to generate Metal shaders.

    • The remote shader compiler can now detect its path. This allows the remote shader compiler to run from locations other than the local path.

    The config.ini file now includes the following options:

    • PrintCommands=1 – Prints the commands that the remote shader compiler uses to generate shaders.

    • PrintWarnings=1 – Prints the compilation warnings that the remote shader compiler receives when shaders are generated.

    Amazon 

    You can find the full breakdown here

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