Amazon unveils Amazon Lumberyard 1.7 Beta

Amazon have announced that their Amazon Lumberyard 1.7 update has entered beta with a blogpost claiming that it’s Lumberyard’s biggest update yet. Lumberyard’s 1.7 beta supposedly includes more than 403 new features, improvements and fixes.

You can download this map here, and the focus seems to be largely on accessibility and making sure that Lumberyard is attractive both to professional game developers and hobbyists a like, claiming: "we want to make sure that our choices never block you from achieving your vision, no matter its sophistication or quality, or the size and makeup of your team"

Some of the big features are below:

• The Lumberyard Asset Browser Preview, which will let you see all of your available assets and use those assets in scenes with dragging and dropping.
• A reworking of the core UI/UX to make Lumberyard more accessible to make the menus easier to navigate without losing functionality. This is optional for developers who have previously used Lumberyard and might be used to everything where it already is.
• A new deployment tool in the Lumberyard editor, so you can deploy builds to mobile devices with just a few clicks, allowing you to quickly test Android builds at any time.
• A reworking multiplayer sample, which can be up and running within 30 minutes and claims to have improved latency and network communications.
• VisualStudio 2015 support

There are a variety of other small features as part of the update, and you can find the full list of features on Lumberyard’s blog.