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Amazon Lumberyard: free AAA game engine with Oculus and AWS integration

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Lumberyard: free AAA game engine with Oculus and AWS integration

#2

Post by jdoliner »

I'm pretty wowed.The quality of code that's being opensourced lately really seems to be ticking up. I didn't take the time to play with it so I'll be interested to hear the first reactions but it certainly looks pretty good in the screenshots. And integration directly into AWS could really streamline a lot of the difficulty of making online multiplayer games. I suspect this will put a new class of games in reach for indie development which is going to be really cool.

Re: Amazon Lumberyard: free AAA game engine with Oculus and AWS integration

#3

Post by thenomad »

Digging into the details, it seems this is largely a fork or adaption of the CryEngine, with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings.

As I said about Autodesk's offering, Stingray, I think that even a giant like Amazon is going to have an uphill battle bringing a new game engine into mass use. Having been testing game engines just this week, I'm reminded just how much of an ecosystem has built up around Unity in particular - displacing an engine with that is like displacing Wordpress as the dominant blogging engine.

It's early days yet but they've got some serious catching up to do. For example, it appears that 3D assets can only currently be created in Max and Maya (no Blender, no Cinema4d), as rather than using FBX or similar as an interchange format they're using their own custom formats with an exporter. Most other game engines stopped doing that a while ago, for good reason.

Likewise, the level editor is either underdocumented or feature-light. The docs currently just cover creating terrain and vegetation. I assume that the engine has the capability to handle non-outdoor scenes too, but it's not explicitly documented anywhere I can find in a quick look.

There's also no documentation on non-sky lighting, lighting builds, light types, or similar that I can find. There's one mention that the engine supports Global Illumination, but no details as to whether it's realtime or requires a bake process. Searching for "lighting", "lights", or "light" in the documentation returns no results!

Interestingly, there's a full-featured cinematics system, which means it's of considerable interest to me, but that's very much a minority thing.

I wish them luck and I'll certainly be checking it out, having said all that. Another fully open-source 3D engine is no bad thing.

Re: Amazon Lumberyard: free AAA game engine with Oculus and AWS integration

#6

Post by patates »

thenomad wrote: post #3

Digging into the details, it seems this is largely a fork or adaption of the CryEngine, with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings. As I said about Autodesk's offering, Stingray, I think that even a giant like Amazon is going to have an uphill battle bringing a new game engine into mass use. Having been testing game engines just this week, I'm reminded just how much of an ecosystem has built up around Unit…

So this was the secret deal which, according to rumors, saved Crytek. This is the second fork of the CryEngine that I know of (other is the Farcry fork of Ubisoft), and I find it interesting that they keep forking it instead of offering a library designed to work with it. I wonder if it says something about the codebase.

Re: Amazon Lumberyard: free AAA game engine with Oculus and AWS integration

#8

Post by patates »

ascorbic wrote: post #4

Note that it's "free, including all source code", but definitively not open source. https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/#Licensing

Exactly. When people see "free, with source code included", they may tend to think that it is open-source. I hope this answer from their FAQ section clears it:

    Q. Is Lumberyard “open source”?
    No. We make the source code available to enable
    you to fully customize your game, but your rights
    are limited by the Lumberyard Service Terms. For
    example, you may not publicly release the
    Lumberyard engine source code, or use it to
    release your own game engine.

Re: Amazon Lumberyard: free AAA game engine with Oculus and AWS integration

#9

Post by julius »

The big question for me is: Why an entire engine?

If they were just interested in getting developers, to use their cloud services. Wouldn't they simply release plugins for all major engines? And wouldn't Unreal and Unity be much more interesting targets (based on their usage in the industry), than CryEngine?

Re: Amazon Lumberyard: free AAA game engine with Oculus and AWS integration

#10

Post by shadowmint »

Some interesting legal stuff with this engine, which their FAQ(1) goes over.

Basically, use it for whatever, free of charge, but not with any other cloud services that mimic amazon's services(2).

Except cloud services for some things, which are fine:

    Your game may read and write data to platform services and public 
    third-party game services for player save state, identity, social 
    graph, matchmaking, chat, notifications, achievements, leaderboards,
    advertising, player acquisition, in-game purchasing, analytics,
    and crash reporting.
Is it a game changer?

Hard to say, but like they say, you can't beat free.

If nothing else, a lot of people are going to download this and have a look at it and mess around with it.

Pretty exciting stuff. :)

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/#licensing

[2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/latest/userguide/lumbe...

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