Amazon ships Lumberyard 1.21
Amazon has released Lumberyard 1.21, the latest beta of the game engine and development environment, adding a new automated secondary animation system, and updating the physics system to PhysX 4.1.
The release also streamlines Lumberyard’s set of platform-specific launcher projects from nine to two, making it easier to develop games for multiple hardware platforms.
New automated secondary motion system, updates to PhysX physics
New features in Lumberyard 1.21 include a Simulated Object node in the EMotion FX animation editor, which automatically generates secondary animation in joint chains: for example, a character’s clothing or hair.
The motion can be controlled by adjusting parameters including mass, stiffness, damping, gravity and friction on a per-joint basis; and by choosing whether the joint chain responds to surrounding collider objects.
Lumberyard’s implementation of PhysX, Nvidia’s real-time physics system, has been updated to PhysX 4.1.
New features include the Temporal Gauss-Seidel solver, for more stable solves of complex joint hierarchies, although some older features have been removed.
Programmers get more streamlined set launcher projects, new Script Canvas features
Amazon has also refactored Lumberyard’s cross-platform architecture, and has reduced the number of platform-specific launcher projects from nine to two.
Rather than having to switch launcher projects for every target platform of a game, devs can now use one project for Windows and Linux servers; another for all client-side desktop and mobile platforms.
In addition, Script Canvas, Lumberyard’s visual programming system, gets three new nodes, Repeater, Switch and Ordered Sequencer, for controlling the timing of events, plus a number of workflow improvements.
Availability and system requirements
Lumberyard 1.21 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 1.21 in the online changelog