Lumberyard Beta 1.8 Release Notes (February 2017)

Announcements Release Notes
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Lumberyard Release Notes – Beta 1.8 (February 2017)

For the most up-to-date release notes and documentation on Lumberyard Beta 1.8, see Lumberyard Release Notes – Beta 1.8 (February 2017).

Lumberyard
Beta 1.8 adds new features, improvements, and fixes. As we continue to improve Lumberyard, we want to thank everyone in our developer community. Without your participation in the forums, your messages, your feedback, and your bug reports, Lumberyard 1.8 wouldn’t be as strong as it is. If you haven’t posted in the forums yet, we would love to have you join the conversation. You can also keep up with new changes by following our blog and leave comments to let us know what you think.

Topics

Highlights

Here’s a sampling of the new features found in Lumberyard 1.8.

Topics

New Look for Lumberyard Editor

Lumberyard Editor has a new look! The editor has been reskinned
with a more modern interface and an improved design for windows, frames, and controls. The default layout now displays the Entity Outliner in the top left panel, the File Browser in the bottom left panel, and the Entity Inspector in the right panel. The Rollup Bar is now tabbed in the right panel.

The
editor navigation has also been updated to reduce the steps required to
open Lumberyard tools. Previously you were required to click View, Open View Pane, and then select a tool. Now you can access all tools from the Tools menu.

FBX SDK Installation Files in Lumberyard Setup Assistant

Lumberyard 1.8 includes the installation files for the FBX SDK.
You must install the SDK if you want to compile the Lumberyard engine, asset pipeline, and editor. To install the SDK, in the Lumberyard Setup Assistant, on the Install required SDKs page, click Install SDK under Autodesk FBX SDK. Ensure the installation path is set to your third-party directory.

Multiple UV Support for Meshes

Lumberyard 1.8 adds multiple UV support, allowing up to two UV channels on static meshes and independent texture tiling for layered materials. This new feature allows you to combine two unique UV layouts,
tile or animate each layer as desired, and blend with a blend mask. You
can enable this feature using a shader generation parameter on shaders that support blend layers.

The following features were also added:

  • Support
    for independently tiled texture maps. If you change the tiling, rotation, or oscillation values for the blend layer, detail map, or emittance shader features, these values are modified independently from the rest of the material’s tiling, rotation, and oscillation values.
  • Support for second layer specular map and specular color.
  • Support for occlusion map for the Illum shader.
  • Specular anti-aliasing on the Illum shader.
    For more information, see Using Multiple UV Streams.

Animate Component Entities in Track View

You can now animate the following component entities with Track View:

  • Transform
  • Camera
  • Light (Point, Area, Projector)
  • Skinned Mesh
  • Static Mesh
  • Simple Animation
    Reflect
    the component properties using the behavior context for animation in Track View. For more information about these component entities, see Component Reference. For more information about animating using Track View, see the Cinematics System.

Amazon GameLift – Game Session Queues and Player Data

The following features have been added for Amazon GameLift:

  • Use
    game session placement queues to place new game sessions faster and more efficiently across Amazon GameLift resources. Place game sessions on any of an ordered list of fleets that can span multiple regions. This
    feature lets you handle increased player demand by spreading it across existing fleets and regions instead of scaling up a single fleet. With game session placements, you can also join one or more players to the game session at the same time. Add information on player-region latency to help Amazon GameLift find the best available fleet to host the new game session for the players. For more information, see Setting Up Queues.
  • You
    can now provide customized player data to a game server when a player joins the game. This feature is useful for delivering information from a
    game service directly to the game server. Player data may include any information that your game server can interpret, such as team memberships or skill/rank data from a matchmaking service. If your game uses encrypted client/server communication, player data is a good way to
    deliver a decryption key to the game server. For more information, see Join a Player to a Game Session.

Behavior Context Replaces the Script Context

Lumberyard Beta 1.8 introduces consequential changes to the behavior context. Significant improvements to the Lumberyard Editor include replacing the existing script context with a new reflection context. For information about these changes and instructions to migrate
your existing projects, see Migrating Lumberyard Projects.

Behavior Context Updates for Component Entity Lua Scripts

Component entity Lua scripts are also impacted by the changes to the behavior context. If you have written or currently use component entity Lua scripts, you must convert them to the new behavior context syntax. For information about these changes and instructions to migrate your existing projects, see Migrating Lumberyard Projectsand

New Virtual Reality Features

Lumberyard 1.8 adds the following features and functionality for virtual reality:

  • TheAI:RayCastMNMnode allows you to ray cast with the AI navigation mesh.
  • TheStereoRendererbuswithIsRenderingToHMDfunction allows you to identify when the renderer is rendering to the HMD.
  • TheVR:Playspacenode allows you to extend Playspace control on Oculus and Vive.
  • TheVR:VRPreviewComponentnode allows you to generate a navigation mesh for VR teleport.
  • A VR debug camera allows you to use theW,A,S, andDkeys to move relative to the camera. Enable the VR debug camera by setting thehmd_debug_cameraconsole variable to 1.
    For more information, see Virtual Reality.