It’s been awhile since we’ve heard much about Lumberyard, but maybe that’s because everyone’s shut up about engines these days and focused on the games. Or maybe it’s because none of its high-profile titles built in Amazon’s engine have materialized yet. That includes Star Citizen, which moved to Lumberyard last year, along with Everywhere from Rockstar veterans, and Amazon’s own take on MOBAs, Breakaway.
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But development of the engine continues, and it seems that it’s starting to evolve away from its CryEngine roots, according to a recent update. Animation and entity systems are moving toward more modern tools, and a new visual scripting language called Script Canvas should help novice programmers to use the engine more easily. Various performance enhancements are on the way as well.
Support for Mac OS is also on the way, which will be a boon for iOS developers. Improvements to the engine’s performance on mobile devices is also on the way, along with battery optimizations and a reduced base file size. Several of the new updates also seem to be geared to enticing inexperienced developers toward the engine.
One of Lumberyard’s biggest billed features is its Twitch integration, where chat can have a direct influence on the game itself. Naturally, direct integration with a game engine is also beneficial to Twitch, which Amazon now owns.
Lumberyard has a long way to go before it can match the adoption of either Unreal or Unity, but some big players are sticking with the system. More options for developers are certainly a good thing.