Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 187 posts

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

#101

Post by thenomad »

vilya wrote: post #84
keyle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame about the 3D format supports. :(

They do seem to have some Alembic support: they ship the libraries as part of the engine download, in their 3rdParty folder. Alembic is an open 3D file format supported by pretty much all the major 3D modellers these days - including Blender, Modo, Houdini, Cinema4D and plenty of others besides the Autodesk tools.

Oh, really? Now THAT is interesting.

Neither Unity nor Unreal currently support Alembic - this is the first indication I've had that the Amazon engine might have some features the others don't.

Thanks!

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

#102

Post by thenomad »

agentultra wrote: post #93
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…

I don't think we're done making game engines. We're not done making blogging engines. Wordpress may be one of the largest incumbents but it's not the dominant platform and there are plenty of competing alternatives along every axis. Unity may be one of the current incumbents but it's not the best engine and won't be the last. More competition is good. It means Unity won't be able to stand still and we'll get to see m…

Oh, definitely not. We aren't at The Last Game Engine by a long way - but currently it's an uphill battle to introduce a new one, and I'm dubious this engine is differentiated enough to succeed.

There might be a lot of competing blogging engines, but there's only really about 3 that have any significant market share, and you can explain why each of them are has at least one radically superior feature to Wordpress in about a sentence and a half.

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

#103

Post by [deleted] »

patates wrote: post #6
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.

[deleted]

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

#104

Post by mjblack »

gravypod wrote: post #80

What is this auto-scaling back end system about? How does it work? Does it just launch more nodes in a cluster or does it actually expand the VM that you are running in like expanding an OVZ container.

AWS autoscaling is service that can be used to scale applications based on different metrics, one being CPU load and another is ELB traffic. I'm sure there is probably more options but the idea is it scales up and down depending on the policies put in place. It'll launch either VMs or containers, which is really how you design the autoscaling configuration.

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

#105

Post by jmatthews »

markatkinson wrote: post #22

I got pretty excited and rushed through the article trying to clarify what engine and language it is based on. Got a little bleak when I saw CryEngine and C++. As someone who uses C# and Java it's becoming pretty clear I need to start learning C++ if I want to explore game dev. I realize Unity uses C# but when I compare UE, Unity and CryEngine it really feels like Unity still has a long way to go. The features you ge…

Trust me when I say they all lack a fully polished end to end solution when it comes to authoring modern games.

Depending on the graphical fidelity you're chasing Unity is probably the most polished of the 3 majors.

UE4 is a great tool but has a slower development cycle.

CryEngine is almost broken unless you're willing to do a deep dive in the source.

If by "explore game dev" you mean, "make games" Unity or UE4 will serve you well. UE4 has a nexus of great artists using the tool so recruiting artists that are familiar with the toolset is easier. Unity is some multiple of more productive, pending your skill level with C#.

I've evaluated all 3, am a proficient programmer in C++ and C#(among others), and have shipped several games with Unity. I've also worked on a couple of shipped titles with UE4.(nothing major)

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

#106

Post by deelowe »

Grue3 wrote: post #17

The wording is rather strange. >free AAA game engine Doesn't being called that require that there are AAA games developed with it? According to wikipedia, "In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") or Triple-A is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion or the highest ratings by a consensus of professional reviewers." So if it's an engine for game…

Royalty based models are quickly becoming the norm for even AAA engines. Source 2, Unity, Unreal, and now this version of crytek utilize this model. This pretty much means that the top 4 game engines now have a "free" option.

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

#107

Post by TrevorJ »

mikeash wrote: post #71
jo909 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note that you can not use other cloud platforms for your games backend. While I understand their position, I consider that a deal breaker. Q. Can my game use an alternate web service instead of AWS? No. If your game servers use a non-AWS alternate web service, we obviously don’t make any money, and it’s more difficult for us to support future development of Lumberyard. By “alternate web service” we mean any non-…

That seems pretty crazy to me. I get that they're using this as a loss leader to promote their services, but it seems to me that they'd do much better if they just made it work great with AWS such that it was the natural choice. If you integrate AWS heavily then people will pick it anyway, but if they think it's their own decision they'll be a lot happier with it.

Developing a game is such a time and resource intensive process, I don't see any AAA studios locking themselves into using AWS. It's a non-starter.

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

#109

Post by TranquilMarmot »

BatFastard wrote: post #90
dahart wrote: post #87

https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ 57.10 Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities…

That's really in there! There are lawyers with a sense of humor?

Maybe they're coming out with a zombie game...?
Post reply on HN