News from Jan 18, 2016 – Jan 25, 2016

Hello and welcome to the third issue of This Week in Amethyst, a blog bringing you the latest changes and updates regarding the Amethyst game engine every week. If you have any suggestions or ideas, feel free to call me out on [Gitter][gc].

Three pull requests, two in the engine and one in the tools landed this week.

What’s cooking on master?

Notable additions

• Version 0.2.1 of Amethyst has been successfully rolled out! Both the engine and the CLI tool repositories have seen some major internal restructuring to increase modularity, fixing engine issue #13.

• The amethyst crate now re-exports two sub-crates: amethyst_engine (the core game engine), and amethyst_renderer (the rendering system). More crates are forthcoming.
• The amethyst_cli repository has been renamed to amethyst_tools. This will host the entirety of Amethyst’s future tool suite.

• We have adopted a leaner, meaner change log format (engine issue #17, tools issue #5).

• All of the renderer code has been removed and its backend will be rewritten over GFX. Thanks to @kvark of the GFX project for the collaboration!

Breaking changes

• Due to engine restructuring, use statements must be updated to amethyst::engine.
• amethyst_cli has been discontinued. Please install amethyst_tools instead!

New issues

• Engine
  • Use GFX for rendering (issue #16)
  • Finalize renderer design (issue #19)
• Tools
  • Reorganize project infrastructure (issue #4)
  • Adopt new change log format (issue #5)

New contributors

• Dzimitry Malyshau (kvark)

Other announcements

A revamped parallel renderer design diagram has been drafted and is in need of public feedback before any implementation can begin. Please see engine issue #19 for details.

More feedback is still needed on the thread-safe ECS design tracked by [engine issue #10][e10]. Should we use existing ECS solutions, or should we write our own? Leave your input there.

In other news, there has been a recent explosion of activity [on the Gitter chat][gc], which is wonderful to see. Have any questions, suggestions, or comments? Come join the conversation!