Amazon Lumberyard 1.3 will add VR support

Amazon has detailed the biggest addition for its game engine’s next point release, and it all centres on virtual reality.

Lumberyard 1.3, which will enter beta in a few weeks, will introduce support for both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive using the engine’s Gems system: self-contained packages of assets and features.

A blog post reveals that in addition to Gems for both the Rift and Vive, devs will be able to use these as templates “to build their own Gems and support any VR devices they want”.

The firm’s graphics and VR engineer Cody White wrote: “Gems make adding support for new VR devices easy, with no engine code editing required. Developers won’t have to wait for an official patch or a new plug-in to start using commercial devices (or prototype devkits) as they hit the market. 

“With customers asking to use so many different VR devices—and with new devices being announced all the time—it would be cumbersome and code-intensive for an engine to have hard-wired support for all of them. We knew that we had to find a way for customers to add support to any VR device they liked.”

Amazon Lumberyard is based on CryEngine and was launched just before GDC. You can read our interviews with Amazon on its plans for Lumberyard here and here.