News from
Sep 16, 2017–Oct 18, 2017
Hello and welcome to the 11th issue of This Fortnight in Amethyst, a blog
bringing you the latest changes and updates regarding the Amethyst game engine
every fortnight. If you have any suggestions or ideas, feel free to voice them
on GitHub or the Gitter chat.
25 pull requests, in the engine landed this fortnight.
Amethyst is considering participating in Google’s Summer of Code, but we need more mentors! If you’d like to volunteer please let us know on #412
Also, as you can see the blog has moved to a bi-weekly format.
Assets have been reworked on develop! We’ve made the system less abstract and more flexible. Thanks @torkleyy for your tireless efforts on this front! #416
Major project restructure. We’re currently working on a large scale overhaul to the project structure, new crates will be appearing and functionality will be moved from the core crate to these new crates. After this is complete we’re hoping your import lists will look much cleaner and structures and functions will be easier to find. Thanks @Rhuagh for your many pull requests to help accomplish this! (Too many pull requests to list for this bullet)
Renderer resizing has landed! Your render targets will now resize with the window. This was authored by yours truly, @Xaeroxe in #402
But will it blend? Amethyst now has support for BlendTargets in passes, enabling you to provide and use blending algorithms for your rendering, this makes things like transparent and translucent passes possible. Authored by @Xaeroxe in #411
Your game will now by default automatically close when a Window::Closed event
is received, you no longer need to explicitly quit in every state when this
event arrives. Authored by @Xaeroxe in #420
WindowMessages have arrived on develop! A new resource added to the specs
world permits you to provide closures to operate on the winit::Window allowing
you to programmatically hide the cursor, and resize the window among other things.
Authored by @Xaeroxe in #387
The entire project has been restructured, and assets have been rewritten. You’ll likely need to update your import lists when upgrading, and restructure how you’re handling assets. We apologize for this maintenance burden, but we feel it’s worthwhile as the new asset system will permit much more robust asset loading in the future, such as our upcoming GLTF loader.
In addition to this a large volume of generic parameters have been removed across the project and replaced with suitable types internally.
While we don’t have any specific calls for participation this post please never hesitate to send us a PR if you’ve got something you want to contribute! We’re always happy to have more contributors!
