Amazon ships Lumberyard 1.22
Amazon has released Lumberyard 1.22, the latest beta of the game engine and development environment, adding new automated tools for bundling assets for release with a game.
The update also adds a Lumberyard Gem for texture debugging.
New asset dependency graph and automated Asset Bundler tool
The major change in Lumberyard 1.22 is the new asset dependency graph, which tracks which other assets a given asset depends on: for example, the texture maps required by a material.
It underpins a new command-line Asset Bundler tool that automatically packages assets for release with a game, including only those that are actually in use.
The feature is intended to avoid time-consuming manual work removing assets created during development but then removed from a game from the final build.
A separate Asset Processor tool scans a project for missing dependencies.
There are also a number of new debugging features, including an experimental tool to analyse the memory used by each asset within a level, and a memory overrun detector.
DevTextures Gem packages debugging textures like UV grids
New art features in Lumberyard 1.22 include a new DevTextures Gem that provides a collection of textures for development and debugging, including checkermaps and UV layout grids.
Amazon has also added a set of sample slices and scripts for the PhysX real-time physics system.
Availability and system requirements
Lumberyard 1.22 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 1.22 in the online changelog