News from Sep 11, 2016 – Sep 16, 2017

Hello and welcome to the 10th issue of This Week Year in Amethyst, a blog bringing you the latest changes and updates regarding the Amethyst game engine every week year. If you have any suggestions or ideas, feel free to voice them on GitHub or the Gitter chat.

145 pull requests in the engine landed this week year.

Announcements

Version 0.5.1 was released! A lot of work was done during this year. Asset management was rewritten by @torkleyy in #244 now assets can be loaded asynchronously using futures. Audio support was added by @Xaeroxe in #265 Renderer was rewritten by @eyalkalderon in #285 now we have better design and parallel data rendering. Input system was overhauled by @Xaeroxe in #247, @261, and #274 now we have input rebinding. Thanks to @torkleyy’s work in #269 we now use RON instead of YAML for configs.

What’s cooking on develop?

Notable additions

• Input system has been even further refactored to be event driven and generic by @Xaeroxe in #385
• Specs aware renderer pipeline added by @omni-viral in #317
• ECS bundles added by @Rhuagh in #364 (These bundle up related components and resources, making it easier to get started with amethyst.)

Breaking changes

• Asset management was rewritten by @torkley
• RON instead of YAML is used as config format thanks to @torkleyy
• Input system was overhauled by @Xaeroxe
• Renderer was completely rewritten by @eyalkalderon with help from @omni-viral

Calls for participation

• We could really use some help with getting our tools repository and the book up to date, any help here would be greatly appreciated!

New amethyst organization members

• omni-viral
• torkleyy
• Xaeroxe

New contributors

• Xaeroxe
• torkleyy
• omni-viral
• Rhuagh
• vitvakatu
• mechaxl
• Lionex
• derekdreery
• Binero
• Object905
• ivandardi
• anderejd
• ahmedcharles
• stenverbois
• aochagavia
• minecrawler
• Cldfire
• ForsakenHarmony
• scorbeil
• Hammster
• jFransham
• vvuk
• sekhat
• palodequeso
• cooperra

New issues

It’s been so long since one of these posts has been written that most of our issues qualify as “new” so this section is being omitted from this post.