Amazon ships Lumberyard 1.19
Amazon has released Lumberyard 1.19, the latest beta of the game engine and development environment, adding a new dynamic vegetation system.
The update also includes significant workflow improvements to Script Canvas, Lumberyard’s visual scripting system, and introduces an experimental viewport interaction model.
New dynamic vegetation system places plants procedurally based on surface data
The main new feature in Lumberyard 1.19 is dynamic vegetation, which uses the component entity system to place vegetation procedurally, with plants loading, instantiating and despawning automatically.
Users can influence the placement of vegetation via surface data components, which make it possible to tag in-game entities by land type – dirt, grass, road, water, and so on – or via gradient components, which also provides the option to apply procedural noise.
According to Amazon, users can “create complex biomes in one nested slice to apply changes across areas of an entire world”.
New functionality and usability updates for Script Canvas
There are also some significant changes to Script Canvas, Lumberyard’s visual scripting environment, which gets support for arrays and maps – used to create key/value pairs – as well as individal data values.
Workflow improvements include the option to group nodes and colour-code or collapse the groups to keep a node network organised; and to align selected nodes relative to one another.
Users can also now generate chains of linked nodes with Lumberyard creating connections automatically.
For troubleshooting Script Canvas set-ups, there is a new runtime debugger and a new Script Canvas Testing gem for running unit tests, plus an experimental Statistics dialog for tracking node usage.
Experimental new viewport interaction model simplifies the process of manipulating objects
Other changes in Lumberyard 1.17 include an experimental new viewport interaction model based on universal manipulators rather than gizmos.
The system is intended to make manipulating entities in the viewport more intuitive, making it easier to switch between local and world space, and to work with multiple entities.
It’s currently still experimental, lacking key features like vertex snapping, and only works in certain editors: the Terrain and Track View editors are not supported, and the Material Editor only partly so.
Availability and system requirements
Lumberyard 1.19 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 1.19 in the online changelog