Amazon ships Lumberyard 1.18
Amazon has released Lumberyard 1.18, the latest beta of the game engine and development environment, extending support for PhysX, and adding new animation and texture processing functionality.
The new features will be on show at GDC 2019 this week.
New PhysX dynamics and animation features
The update extends Lumberyard’s support for PhysX, Nvidia’s proprietary real-time physics system, used in most contemporary 3D game engines.
Lumberyard’s implementation is available for Windows only, and is based on the PhysX 3.4 API rather than the newest PhysX 4.0 API, which was released late last year.
The engine’s new PhysX gem enables users to set up dynamic and kinematic rigid body simulations; set up terrain and inter-object collisions; and adjust material properties like friction and bounciness.
In addition, Lumberyard’s Animation Editor now supports PhysX-powered ragdoll behaviour for characters, along with a sizeable list of other new features, including support for actor LODs.
New texture-processing and render to texture options
Lumberyard’s texture handling has also been overhauled, with a new Image Processing gem providing access to a new Texture Settings editor.
The latter enables users to edit the processing options for individual textures: for example, when using different compression or mipmap settings for mobile and desktop editions of a game.
There is also a new Render to Texture component that can be used to render a scene from a specific camera view and output the result to a texture, for effects like rear-view mirrors in driving games.
Other changes include improved UI Editor, new layer system for level data
New features in Lumberyard’s UI Editor include support for UI texture atlases, clickable text links and inline image markup, plus new options for anchoring and aligning UI elements.
There is also a new layer system for level data, enabling users to divide a level up into discrete files that multiple artists can work on simultaneously.
According to Amazon, the release introduces a total of over 150 new features, including a new fast analysis mode for the Asset Processor, designed to cut start-up times. You can find a full list via the link below.
Availability and system requirements
Lumberyard 1.18 is available now. The editor runs on Windows 7 and above.
The engine is free to use for developing offline and local multiplayer games, including source code access; online games must use Amazon Web Services, charged at Amazon’s standard AWS rates.
Read a full list of new features in Lumberyard 1.18 in the online changelog