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

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

#121

Post by outworlder »

nacs wrote: post #76
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…

> choosing a free engine is a cost-saving measure, at which point you're no longer making an AAA game by definition Not necessarily. 2 of the most popular game engines, Unreal Engine and Unity3d, have very good free offerings now and many AAA games have been made with them. You can have multi-million dollar development budgets and only be using "free" engines without issue nowadays.

Except that, at that level, it is no longer 'free'. Unity will likely be the Pro version (still peanuts). Unreal will also get a chunk of the pie. It's only free up to a point, which is reasonable.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by outworlder »

UK-AL wrote: post #118
autoreleasepool wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# is a perfectly reasonable choice for a phone game that can afford garbage collection pauses. This means turn-based. In every other case, you're better off using a language whose resource management model doesn't fight you. Swift is the best of both worlds in this regard.

Considering virtually every major mobile game is unity these days, is this really an issue?

Not at all. Memory management for games is something you have to pay close attention to, no matter what's your strategy for dealing with garbage. But this whole GC discussion is missing several years of technology development and best practices.

Besides, it is not guaranteed that you'll succeed with a manual strategy for dealing with garbage. Naive strategies have a really low throughput. They may not stop the world, but will be slow.

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

#124

Post by Deregibus »

[deleted] wrote: post #122
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…

[deleted]

Might want to read that clause a bit closer, Amazon's carved out some unique exceptions...

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

#125

Post by 542458 »

Deregibus wrote: post #124
[deleted] wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Might want to read that clause a bit closer, Amazon's carved out some unique exceptions...

Oh man, I didn't notice that last bit - sorry! I just saw the first half of the paragraph and assumed it was the same nukes/life support/air traffic story I'd seen a few time before. That's actually much more funny!

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

#126

Post by acdha »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #111
TrevorJ wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely agree. You'd be at the mercy of Amazon's AWS pricing for the whole lifecycle of your game. Let's say they suddenly increase the price tenfold... you either shut off your multiplayer (not an option for some games), host it all yourself (which would mean buying servers, paying people to maintain them, changing the game to use a new backend, etc.), or switch to another engine (essentially, recreate your game…

You have to weigh these risks against the likelihood of them actually happening. If AWS made a first-ever price increase, yes, you'd then have to consider whether you could beat that pricing by doing it in-house but you have to balance that against the very low odds of it actually happening and the up-front costs of hiring a ton of staff (e.g. just having 24x7 support requires something like 5 people when you factor in leave, vacations, etc.), buying or renting a lot of hardware, developing and getting operational confidence in a complicated software stack, etc.

That's a LOT of money to spend up front on a gamble that something which has never happened before occurs with so little notice that you wouldn't be able migrate away first. It's hard to see anyone but the major players having enough economy of scale to see positive returns on that investment, much less having enough budget room to where that makes sense rather than spending the same amount of money on something which users actually see.

That gets to the other reason why this is so unlikely: raising prices in a predatory manner would be a loud message to every AWS customer to find alternatives. Since AWS generates something like 7-8 billion dollars a year that's an enormous amount of money to risk — far greater than any short-term return they'd see.

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

#127

Post by wlesieutre »

wlesieutre wrote: post #100
patates wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another major engine fork is for Star Citizen / Squadron 42. They've hired several ex-Crytek engineers at the Foundry 42 office in Frankfurt, and among other changes have modified the engine to support a 64 bit data in coordinate system and rendering, multithreaded physics, and independent physics grids for inside the larger ships while they're moving around. Probably other things, but those are the main ones.

This sort of thing is actually pretty common in games; you end up doing some engine customization to fit your needs, and eventually you have to say "We've diverged too far to try and keep following the main updates anymore," and you stick with a customized version of an old release.

Nearly every AAA game is going to fit into that pattern, it's just that the 64 bit coordinates overhaul in Star Citizen is probably a larger and lower level architectural change than what most things bother with.

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

#128

Post by falcolas »

acdha wrote: post #126
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree. You'd be at the mercy of Amazon's AWS pricing for the whole lifecycle of your game. Let's say they suddenly increase the price tenfold... you either shut off your multiplayer (not an option for some games), host it all yourself (which would mean buying servers, paying people to maintain them, changing the game to use a new backend, etc.), or switch to another engine (essentially, recreate your game…

You have to weigh these risks against the likelihood of them actually happening. If AWS made a first-ever price increase, yes, you'd then have to consider whether you could beat that pricing by doing it in-house but you have to balance that against the very low odds of it actually happening and the up-front costs of hiring a ton of staff (e.g. just having 24x7 support requires something like 5 people when you factor…

> If AWS made a first-ever price increase

Actually, AWS does this all the time: for new or growing large scale users they offer a discount on the list price. Once the user is firmly embedded in AWS, they stop offering the discount. This can lead to an effective doubling of the cost of using AWS.

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

#129

Post by Narishma »

UK-AL wrote: post #118
autoreleasepool wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# is a perfectly reasonable choice for a phone game that can afford garbage collection pauses. This means turn-based. In every other case, you're better off using a language whose resource management model doesn't fight you. Swift is the best of both worlds in this regard.

Considering virtually every major mobile game is unity these days, is this really an issue?

Unity is a C++ engine. Only the game code is done in C#.

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

#130

Post by jamiesonbecker »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #65
dragonwriter wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a contradiction "FOSS" encompasses the software which meets the (nearly-equivalent in practical application) FSF Free Software definition and/or OSI Open Source definition. If it is open source software (which this is emphatically and expressly not), it is FOSS.

Software can be commercial and open source meaning you can read the code but you have to purchase a licence to make copies and/or use it - that's open source but not Free[-Gratis] Open Source Software (FOSS).

Although FOSS has a broad definition[1], most technical people refer to Free Software by the GNU interpretation, in which the Free in FOSS is "Free as in Freedom, not Free as in Beer". FOSS is generally considered a subset of Open Source software.

You can charge as much as you like for FOSS[2].

Open Source is not the same as Source Available[3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software

2. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-sour...

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