Hello Lumbernauts!

As an eventful year comes to an eventful end, our plucky team of developers is busy making much requested improvements to the Amazon Lumberyard engine with an aim to tighten up usability with optimized workflows throughout the user interface, support for new and improved physics features, and even more customization options for developers on major platforms. These improvements are now available in the Lumberyard Beta 1.27 update!

Below is the list of major improvements that you’ll be able to play with, just in time for the holidays!

• UI 2.0 General Availability – including more than 75 bug fixes and improvements.
• NVIDIA Blast Support
  • With Python Asset Builder support to help you create more complicated and expressive KA-BOOMs!
• Advanced features for NVIDIA Cloth, including complex cloth mesh support and constraints, and performance improvements
• PhysX is replacing CryPhysics as our physics engine
• New Gem updates to enhance the Twitch ChatPlay experience
• Dynamic Content Gem (Cloud Canvas) versioning support
• Project Configurator – If you have both Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio 2019 enabled in the Setup Assistant, you will now be asked which compiler to use when you rebuild your project.

We’ve spent a lot of time replacing CryPhysics with a new NVIDIA PhysX-based physics system, and we’re incredibly proud to announce that this work is complete. CryPhysics is now deprecated, with PhysX now supported across every Lumberyard workflow. This means you can now “switch it off” by compiling with a micro flag set.

“Okay, that’s nice,” you say, “but besides all the performance improvements and bug fixes, what else do I get?” That’s a great question, and the answer is: This update also adds support for the NVIDIA Blast destruction library, as well as new advanced NVIDIA Cloth support! Make things shatter and crumble, or build more complex cloth meshes (that can now be simulated on multiple cores.) Destroy or create, or both! The choice is yours. (For more details, check out the Lumberyard Beta 1.27 release notes.)

And guess what has its General Availability (GA) release with this version? UI 2.0! UI 2.0 is now the default user interface experience for Lumberyard (UI 1.0 is now fully deprecated). We’ve made a number of improvements based on your feedback and addressed quite a few bugs. Among these updates, we improved the utility of scrollbars and sliders, cleaned up the Python Scripting help window, and refactored parts of the Asset Editor.

If you’re building UI tools, don’t forget to check out the recently published UI Extensions Guide. It’s chock-full of helpful usage guidelines for custom UI styles and widgets, with links into the new UI C++ API Reference. Keep sending your comments and input to continue helping us improve the usability of the now one-and-only Lumberyard user interface!

Twitch support also receives some love, in the form of major updates to the Twitch ChatPlay Gem and the Websocket Gem. You can now add Twitch IRC support to your game, and let streamers and players alike interact while they play.

Or maybe you’re trying to put a little more story in your game? Cinematics gets some attention this release, too. We’ve updated TrackView to use asset keys and expose new functionality (via EBus) for scripting cinematic events.

Lastly, we’ve improved Node Grouping support to Script Canvas, updated the Dynamic Content Gem in Cloud Canvas, and improved both Setup Assistant and Project Configurator to provide better installation guidance and clarify Visual Studio compiler support. As ever, for complete details about this release, read the Lumberyard 1.27 release notes.

The Lumberyard team is excited to share this update with you as we close out 2020 and continue our march to make Lumberyard an awesome multi-platform game development environment. Check out Lumberyard 1.27 and share your feedback in the Lumberyard forums. We are listening!

Get Started

To get started with Amazon Lumberyard, please visit the Lumberyard webpage to download the service. To learn more about Lumberyard, check out our tutorials on YouTube and on the Lumberyard Tutorials page. You can also find Lumberyard on GitHub. Full source is available there, as well as the ability to contribute back to Lumberyard.

As we continue to improve our service, we want to thank everyone in the community who have made suggestions to help us offer a better product every release. Keep sending feedback to the forums and to lumberyard-feedback@amazon.com.

For the latest Lumberyard updates, follow us on Twitter and Facebook.