New Dynamic Vegetation System in Lumberyard Beta 1.19 – Available Now

Content creators, this one is for you.

Over the past few months we’ve been working closely with the Lumberyard community to empower you to build faster without relying on a fleet of engineers. And so today, we are excited to release Lumberyard Beta 1.19, which includes over 150 new features, improvements and fixes, so you can create beautiful, dense worlds, and iterate faster towards great gameplay – without relying on anyone else. You can download Lumberyard 1.19 here.

Building huge worlds of exciting gameplay for your players takes a lot of time, and is typically filled with manual and repetitive workflows. Furthermore, if you have to rely on a team of engineers to build all of your gameplay for that world, testing new ideas can take weeks or even months. Here are two ways you can build big, immersive worlds faster using Lumberyard 1.19:

• New Dynamic Vegetation System. Procedurally generate a diverse and detailed biome in minutes instead of manually placing and painting in vegetation. Lumberyard’s new vegetation components support a wide range of artistic expressions and fine-grained control over the scale, density, and distribution in your biomes. You can also improve runtime performance by configuring segments of vegetation to be placed or removed at runtime based on player location and gameplay events.
• Major updates to Script Canvas. Create even more dynamic behaviors and gameplay without having to code or rely on expert engineers. We’ve made major improvements to Script Canvas, introducing support for containers such as arrays and maps, new Script Events that enable you to send events between graphs and scripts, and new graph validation and debugger features so you can find, diagnose, and fix invalid graphs more quickly. We’ve also made workflow improvements to make it even easier add, configure, and organize nodes in your graphs.

You can read about all of the Lumberyard 1.19 features and improvements in the full release notes here. Other highlights include optimizations to the Starter Game sample project so it is performant on mobile devices, and new Cloud Canvas features that help you prepare Cloud Gem-powered online services for production.

To help you get started and learn more about Lumberyard, we’re continually making updates to our tutorials. You can find them on YouTube. Help us improve and tell us what you would like to see more of by heading over to the tutorial discussion forum.

We also want your feedback to help drive the Lumberyard roadmap and feature improvements. Get in touch with us in our forums.