Thanks to your feedback, we’ve added over 270 improvements in Lumberyard Beta 1.15. With this release, we’re focusing on how Lumberyard’s integration with AWS enables game developers of all sizes to connect their games and accelerate game development.

Lumberyard Cloud Gems make it easy to build popular cloud-connected features using AWS. Cloud Gems allow you to deploy the necessary resources to use AWS in a few minutes and save you from manually configuring those services from the ground up. Check out our Top 5 Cloud Gem picks in the video below:

Take a look at a few Cloud Gem highlights in Lumberyard Beta 1.15:

1. Compute Farm Cloud Gem

Speed up large-scale data processing and get hours back in production. By using the Compute Farm Gem, you can chew through computationally intensive processes in minutes instead of hours or days. The Compute Farm Gem uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to parallelize large-scale processing tasks using a divide and conquer algorithm. Check out our video on how we used the Compute Farm Gem to generate terrain at 16km x 16km resolution in 10 minutes instead of 10 hours here.

2. Metrics Cloud Gem

Improving your game based on data is vital when trying to grow your player base. And now with 1.15, we’re excited to provide an end to end solution that lets you collect game events and visualize them in charts and heatmaps right in Cloud Gem Portal. The new Metrics Cloud Gem can help you make data-informed decisions on what to optimize as you’re developing your game and is flexible enough to work with other AWS services, like Amazon Quicksight.

3. Defect Reporter Cloud Gem

Log player issues and bugs in-game, then output those issues into an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket using the Defect Reporter Cloud Gem. Instead of manually gathering bug data, taking screenshots and entering it into your bug database, the Defect Reporter can grab the data you specify like player coordinates, the state of the world, the build version, or frame rate, and log it (along with a screenshot). You can then share and review the bug reports right from the Cloud Gem Portal.

4. Plus Much More…

You’ll find a lot more to dig into with Lumberyard Beta 1.15. For a full list of updates, be sure to check out the release notes. Here’s a quick look in the meantime:

Dozens of improvements to EMotion FX, including new animation nodes, improved retargeting quality, and workflow improvements

Two new terrain components let you build roads and carve riverbeds

Dozens of Script Canvas improvements, including new nodes, support for UI editing, and more

Improvements for mobile app size and CPU/GPU performance

Support for the newest versions of Audiokinetic’s Wwise and Wwise LTX

And as always, let us know what you think at lumberyard-feedback@amazon.com!