News from Feb 15, 2016 – Feb 22, 2016

Hello and welcome to the sixth 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.

No new pull requests landed this week.

What’s cooking on master?

Notable additions

• A 2013 presentation titled Bitsquid: Behind The Scenes has been added to the list of design inspiration documents. It covers a variety of topics, namely data-oriented design, job parallelism, rapid game development, and lessons learned from the game industry. Huge thanks to BitSquid developer @niklasfrykholm of Autodesk for making this summary!

• Implementation of the user-facing API of amethyst_ecs has begun. This brings us one step closer to merging the ECS game framework into the mainline. Join the discussion on engine issue #10.

New issues

No new issues were opened this week!

New contributors

No new people have joined this week!

Other announcements

Draft 2.0 of the renderer diagram was published to master this week. The design has been simplified considerably with the elimination of intermediate representation (IR) from the renderer, originally conceived for providing network transparency and tool slaving capabilities. This responsibility has been moved upward to the engine level. allowing for things like SFM-style demo record and replay and other goodies. Please leave your thoughts on engine issue #19.

Some meta-news: starting next issue, TWIA’s release schedule will shift from every Monday to every Sunday. This is to get our newsletter in sync with This Week in Rust so readers aren’t stuck reading last week’s post every time. Hopefully this will make things more convenient in the long run!