Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.1 Now Available, Adds Component Entity System, Allegorithmic Substance Integration, FBX Importer, Mobile Support, and More

Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.1 includes 208 new improvements, fixes, and features to Amazon’s free, cross-platform 3D engine that enables you to create the highest-quality games, connect games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans with Twitch. Lumberyard Beta 1.1 introduces significant workflow improvements, the introduction of mobile support for iOS and Android, and extends the functionality of Twitch ChatPlay.

Lumberyard Beta 1.1 includes three new systems that accelerate your team’s workflows on the way to building high-quality games.

• The new Lumberyard Component Entity system enables developers to extend the engine without changing engine code. Changing engine code can take time and engineering resources away from creating fun gameplay. With the Component Entity system, artists and designers, without engineering experience, can use drag-and-drop interfaces in the Lumberyard Editor to combine components into new game objects, for example animated characters, interactive game elements, props and scenery, and more.
• Allegorithmic’s comprehensive texture and material authoring software, Substance, is now integrated with Lumberyard. Artists can procedurally create and modify 3D asset materials using a visual interface to build beautiful worlds faster than traditional hand-painted methods.
• Another workflow improvement in Lumberyard Beta 1.1 is a new FBX Importer. In a few simple steps, the FBX Importer lets developers import 3D meshes and materials that use the popular .FBX file format.

Lumberyard Beta 1.1 also introduces mobile support for iOS devices with an A8 or better processor and the Android-based Nvidia Shield. Lumberyard Beta 1.1 uses Apple’s Metal API and leverages their GMEM fast memory to enable high-fidelity iOS visuals. By using Metal and GMEM, Lumberyard enables your game to directly access and push more data to the Apple GPU hardware, so your game can use the latest rendering techniques (e.g. post effects such as depth of field, glow, flares, and color grading)

We’ve also added new functionality to Twitch ChatPlay to give game designers new ways to tally viewer votes and query the results to create more complex voting interactions in their games. For example, you could build a game that asks fans watching a tournament to pick their favorite game levels, and then the final round of that tournament could take place in the top three levels.

For more full information on this release, see the Lumberyard Beta 1.1 release notes for full details.

To get started with Amazon Lumberyard, please visit the Lumberyard website to download Lumberyard. You can learn more about Lumberyard’s new features by watching our tutorials, visiting the forums, or reading through our documentation.