News
AWS' Lumberyard Game Engine Beta Adds Visual Studio 2017 Support
Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) released a new beta of its Lumberyard game engine with more than 200 new features, including support for Visual Studio 2017.
Since its debut in 2016, Lumberyard -- a free, cross-platform game engine that features a development IDE-- has continued to be infused with new functionality. It's part of the AWS effort to court the lucrative game development market, along with back-end functionality provided by GameLift.
AWS said the new Lumberyard beta 1.14 should be of special interest to fans of visual scripting, as its Script Canvas received multiple updates.
Other new improvements included new components -- part of the Component Entity System -- and support for Visual Studio 2017.
Speaking of the latter, AWS said the new Visual Studio 2017 support is tested against the latest version of the popular IDE, which has moved to a faster release cadence.
"You can use the Lumberyard Setup Assistant to configure Visual Studio 2017, Visual Studio 2015, or both versions," the v1.14 release notes explain. "You must select at least one version in order to install the appropriate Visual Studio redistributables. Waf generates a Visual Studio solution that you can manage with the user_settings.options file (located in the \dev\_WAF_ directory). The Visual Studio version field in this file is automatically updated with the version that you install. If you install both versions, the file uses Visual Studio 2015 as the default value."
Other new features highlighted in a blog post include a Virtual Gamepad gem to create touch-screen controls and a new particle emitter component for UI Editor.
AWS said the new and improved features are designed "to help customers build ambitious, cloud-connected games -- without relying on a fleet of expert engineers to do so."
For more information on Lumberyard, AWS pointed to tutorials, related forums and its documentation.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.