News from Feb 08, 2016 – Feb 15, 2016

Hello and welcome to the fourth 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.

Seven pull requests, two in the engine and five in the tools landed this week.

What’s cooking on master?

Notable additions

• Plenty of work has landed on the ecs branch this week! The revamped component storage and retrieval code, proposed last week by @Oflor, has finally landed. @lschmierer also wrote a set of benchmarks that will help us identify performance bottlenecks as we continue to refine our designs.

• Version 0.2.4 of amethyst_tools has been released! Lots of bug-stomping and code cleanup in the latest version of the command-line build tool, largely thanks to @White-Oak. This release fixes tool-side issues #7, #8, #9, and #10.

• The build tool now returns a non-zero exit code if Cargo errors out, and the tests.sh script now halts properly when tests fail, fixing tools issue [#13]. Thanks again, @White-Oak!

New issues

• Engine
  • Composable Shaders with a similar architecture to ClojureScript’s Gamma (issue #22)
  • Improve API documentation (issue #23)
• Tools
  • Cargo stderr only prints after stdout (issue #7)
  • amethyst new doesn’t put specified name in Cargo.toml (issue #8)
  • amethyst new doesn’t put authors in Cargo.toml (issue #9)
  • amethyst new doesn’t create .gitignore file (issue #10)
  • Expose Cargo exit status if non-zero (issue #13)

New contributors

• White-Oak

Other announcements

More activity on the entity-component-system is happening on the Gitter chat. Please leave your input there or on [engine issue #10][e10].

Thanks for the contributions this week, everyone. Keep up the great work!