Now Available – Lumberyard Beta 1.2

We are excited to announce the release of Lumberyard Beta 1.2, which you can now download here.

With each release, the Lumberyard team looks at ways we can help you achieve higher quality results by iterating on the features, performance, and stability of each of the engine’s components. We’re big believers in kaizen—the Japanese philosophy for “continuous improvement.” We think effective work-flows don’t just fall from the sky. Instead, we believe the tools and pipelines that best help you achieve your vision are created through aggressive iteration after listening to customer feedback. Much like great games themselves are products of constant iteration, tuning, heated debate, and tweaking, the technology used to build those games benefits from the same process.

We’ve brought much kaizen to the Lumberyard Beta 1.2 release. This update includes 218 improvements, fixes, and features across 20 of Lumberyard’s components.

If you’re an artist or animator, you’ll find updates to our particle editor, including support for GPU-simulated particles, so you can dazzle your players with epic-scale visual effects that better leverage the performance of their graphics hardware. You can see a movie our artists created, embedded below, showing hundreds of thousands of GPU-simulated particle effects. We’ve also made usability and stability improvements to both of our character tools, Mannequin and Geppetto, updated the FBX importer so you can automatically convert FBX units to meters as well as read up-axis orientation data, and added the ability for you create 2D animations in our UI editor with key frames and curves.

Networking engineers can use the updated multiplayer gem to get started building multiplayer games faster—you can now set up a multiplayer lobby using the Lumberyard Flow Graph, with no C++ code required. You’ll also see a networking component added to Lumberyard, so you can implement multiplayer features using the new Component Entity System. We’ve made additions to the GridMate API to expose the ability to reuse EC2 instances with Amazon GameLift, resulting in your game needing fewer instances, and reducing your costs. We’ve also updated the user-interface of the preview of the Cloud Canvas Resource Manager so you can more easily create, update, and delete deployments without risking changes to your game’s other deployments. This reduces the risk that you can accidentally make a change to your release version when you only intend for your QA version to get that change.

Mobile is a major area of investment for us, and we want to balance achieving high-performance on today’s most popular devices, while broadening support for additional hardware. In this release, you will see the addition of the Samsung Note 5 and Motorola Nexus 6 to our list of supported Android devices. We’ve made improvements to the GMEM rendering path for iOS developers so you can better use Lumberyard to create high-fidelity iOS visuals by directly talking to the hardware and using the same deferred rendering techniques available on high end PC platforms such as vegetation, glow, flares, and color grading. Lumberyard Beta 1.2 also supports process life management for mobile devices, so your games can handle operating system messages (such as phone calls, low power, etc.) gracefully and with minimal disruption to gameplay.

If you can’t tell, we believe in kaizen, and we especially appreciate the Lumberyard community for sending suggestions and feedback to our forums, our blog posts and lumberyard-feedback@amazon.com. The team loves hearing what you have to say about Lumberyard. Keep it coming!

You can download Lumberyard Beta 1.2 here. For details on everything new in the Lumberyard Beta 1.2 release, check out the full release notes here. Expect to see us again soon with more kaizen to help you build the highest quality games, connect to the vast compute and storage of the cloud, and engage your fans.