Amazon ships Lumberyard 1.24

Amazon has released Lumberyard 1.24, the latest beta of the game engine and development environment.

Most of the new features are more relevant to programmers than game artists, but there are a number of updates to Lumberyard’s new PhysX-based physics system.

Multithreaded PhysX physics with support for CryDesigner objects

Work on moving Lumberyard’s legacy physics system to one based on Nvidia’s PhysX platform continues, with the 1.24 release adding support for multithreading in the PhysX Gem, and new Script Canvas queries.

Objects created with CryDesigner, Lumberyard’s internal modelling toolset, are now compatible with PhysX.

The new Nvidia Cloth-based simulation system introduced in Lumberyard 1.23 also now works on macOS, iOS and Android as well as Windows.

In addition, Amazon has integrated the V-HACD library for mesh decomposition into Lumberyard.

V-HACD decomposition, also recently integrated in the Godot Engine, generates more accurate collision geometry for assets in rigid body physics systems.

Other changes: Visual Studio 2019 support, improved visual scripting

Other changes in Lumberyard 1.24 include support for Visual Studio 2019, the latest version of Microsoft’s IDE, and improvements to Lumberyard’s Script Canvas visual scripting system.

There are also updates to the automated asset bundling system added in Lumberyard 1.22, and FlexMatch matchmaking has been added to the GameLift and Multiplayer Gems for multiplayer games.

You can find a full list of changes, including those breaking backwards compatibility, via the links here.

Availability and system requirements

Lumberyard 1.24 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.

By：Jim Thacker