Lumberyard 1.14 Beta Available

Amazon has recently revealed a new version of its real-time engine called Lumberyard.

Amazon has recently revealed a new version of its real-time engine called Lumberyard. The update brings a Wind Volume for vegetation, particles and physical objects, a Sky Cloud component, and more.

Here is a breakdown from the engine team:

Wind Volume – Use this component to create volumes that are affected by wind. Wind can affect vegetation, particles, and physical objects. You can define attributes of the wind volume such as its direction, speed, resistance, and density.

Example image of the Wind Volume component

Sky Cloud – Use this component to create realistic and detailed cloud effects. You can create clouds with either simple, sprite-based shading, or more complex, voxelized 3D volume shading. You can randomly generate common and volumetric clouds in controlled areas, control where clouds generate, and define the area in which clouds can move.

Example image of the Sky Cloud component

Force Volume – Use this component to apply physical force to objects within a volume. A force will be applied each frame to any object within the bounds of the volume. You can specify the following force types: linear damping, simple drag, local space, spline follow, world space, and point.

Example image of the Force Volume component

Tube Shape – Use this component to create a tube-like volume along a spline shape. To create a tube shape, you use a Splinecomponent to define its volume and specify a radius. You can specify a different radius of the tube at each point in the spline.

Example image of the Tube Shape component

For more information, see the Component Reference in the Amazon Lumberyard User Guide.

New Script Canvas Features

With Script Canvas you can script game logic and behaviors using the component entity system. Script Canvas offers an approachable and easy-to-read environment to author behaviors that use the same framework as Lua and C++. Script Canvas is built to take advantage of the modularity, performance, and flexibility of the component entity system.

Lumberyard 1.14 adds the following Script Canvas features:

  • Variable Manager – Use the Variable Manager pane to create and manage variables for supported variable types, create get or set variable nodes, and add variables to your Script Canvas graph to declare and initialize them. For more information, see Managing Script Canvas Variables.

  • Bookmarks – Add a shortcut to a specific location on your Script Canvas graph. You can then use the Bookmarks pane or keyboard shortcuts to move quickly to that location. For more information, see Adding Bookmarks for Script Canvas.

  • Batch Conversion Tool – Use the batch conversion tool to convert all .scriptcanvas files that are located in a specified directory and its child directories. For more information, see Converting Script Canvas Scripts.

  • Ray Cast Nodes – Use the ray casting nodes to cast rays between entities and positions in 3D space.

Use Morph Targets in the Animation Editor

The EMotion FX Animation Editor helps artists build and animate complex character behavior. The Animation Editor includes visual tools to set up hierarchical state machines, logic, and advanced hierarchical blend trees.

Lumberyard 1.14 adds support for morph targets. A morph target is a deformed mesh that is stored as a series of vertex positions. You can use morph targets to deform a character’s face to animate facial expressions or a character’s body part to correct undesired deformation of skinning. You can also simulate deformation of clothing on a character.

In the Animation Editor, you can use morph targets by adding one of the following nodes:

  • Motion node – Plays morph target animations similar to skeletal animations.

  • Morph Target node – Animates morph targets by changing the weight at runtime.

Example image of the morph targets feature

For more information, see Animation Editor (EMotionFX) in the Amazon Lumberyard User Guide.

Use Virtual Gamepad Gem to Create Touch Screen Controls

Use the Virtual Gamepad gem to provide your game’s UI with touch screen capabilities on mobile devices. After you enable the Virtual Gamepad gem, you can add the virtual gamepad components to your game’s UI in the UI Editor. For more information, see Virtual Gamepad Gem in the Amazon Lumberyard User Guide.

Example image of the Virtual Gamepad gem

New Particle Emitter Component for UI Editor

UI components define the properties of a UI element. The Particle Emitter component is a new UI component that you can use to emit 2D particles from an element. To see in-game examples of completed canvases with a Particle Emitter component, open the UiFeatures level in the SamplesProject project. Enter game mode and then choose Components, Visual Components, Particle Emitter. You can view particle emitter examples that create a variety of spark effects and trail effects.

For more information, see Visual Components – Particle Emitter and UIParticleEmitterComponent in the Amazon Lumberyard User Guide.

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