Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.8 Now Available, Adds Cloud Gems Framework

We are excited to announce the release of Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.8, which includes 234 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 1.8 introduces the Cloud Gems Framework, a new system that helps developers build popular cloud-connected features in as little as 30 minutes, with one engineer.

The Cloud Gems Framework is made up of the Cloud Gem Portal, a web application that lets you visually manage and administer your cloud features (e.g. scheduling messages, releasing dynamic content, or deleting a fraudulent leaderboard score), and Cloud Gems – modular packages of discrete functionality and assets that include everything necessary for a developer to include that functionality into their project, including backend and client functionality. Cloud Gems can be used out of the box in production, and they come with full source code in case you want to customize their behavior in whatever way you choose. Lumberyard Beta 1.8 includes three sample Cloud Gems to help you get started quickly, including Dynamic Content, Leaderboards, and Daily Messages.

Lumberyard Beta 1.8 also includes a streamlined information architecture in the Lumberyard Editor, root motion animation support in the FBX importer, mobile and console support for the Lumberyard multiplayer sample, multi-UV support for meshes, language support in the UI editor, and more.

For more information on this release, read the GameDev Blog and the Lumberyard Beta 1.8 release notes. 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.