Tuesday, December 15th, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

Amazon ships Lumberyard 1.27


Amazon has released Lumberyard 1.27, the latest beta of the game engine and development environment, adding support for Nvidia’s Blast destruction physics system.

Lumberyard’s PhysX physics system and UI 2.0, its new user interface, are both now production-ready; while its Nvidia cloth system is officially now in preview, rather than an experimental feature.

PhysX physics is now supported across ‘all Lumberyard workflows’
Many of the changes in Lumberyard 1.27 affect the new PhysX physics system, which superseded the old CryPhysics system in Lumberyard 1.26 this October.

In version 1.27, the PhysX Gem itself becomes officially production-ready, being “supported across every Lumberyard workflow”, while CryPhysics is now deprecated, and can be compiled out of game builds.

The PhysX system’s Nvidia Cloth component moves from an experimental release to a technical preview.

Cloth meshes now support motion constraints authored in other DCC software; and Lumberyard now handles complex meshes better in cloth simulations, automatically removing duplicated vertices.

In addition, cloth simulations now run in parallel on available CPU cores, improving performance.



Integration of Nvidia Blast lets artists set up destruction sims using Houdini and Lumberyard
The update also adds a new component to the PhysX system: Nvidia Blast, Nvidia’s real-time object destruction library.

The implementation is integrated with Houdini, SideFX’s procedural 3D software, which is required to pre-fracture the geometry and to set up levels of detail for a simulation.

(According to the online documentation, authoring blast assets requires a set of integration plugins and readymade Houdini Digital Assets, so it doesn’t seem to be possible to do so in other DCC applications.)

The resulting pre-fractured assets are then imported into Lumberyard using a new Python Asset Builder, where users can set up the forces that trigger their destruction in-game.

Other changes: UI 2.0 now production-ready, updates to the Cinematics system
Another feature to become production-ready in Lumberyard 1.27 is UI 2.0, the editor’s new “cleaner and more consistent” user interface design, built using the industry-standard Qt library.

The 1.27 release includes “over 160” further changes to the UI, particularly to scrollbars, sliders and the Python Script Help window: you can find a list via the links at the foot of the story.

The old interface design, UI 1.0, has now been removed entirely, and is no longer available in the editor.

The Cinematics system also gets an update, making it possible to set asset keys in the TrackView – for example, to change the texture or effect assigned to an asset at a particular point during a cinematic.

Developers get a new WebSockets Gem, making it possible to use the WebSocket protocol for online games; and support for content versioning in the Dynamic Content Gem.

Availability and system requirements
Lumberyard 1.27 is available now. The editor runs on Windows 7 and above. The integration plugins for Nvidia Blast are compatible with Houdini 18.0+.

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 1.27 in the online release notes

Visit the Lumberyard product website