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

81–90 of 187 posts

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

#81

Post by Slippery_John »

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.

Well, the meaty bits that make Amazon money are all separated out into a service called GameLift and the C++ SDK.

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

#82

Post by dharma1 »

benbristow wrote: post #77
dharma1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wouldn't it make more sense to focus on AWS offerings for Unity3D/Unreal Engine instead?

As far as I know Amazon are going to start making their own games as well. Makes sense to use their own engine so they don't have to share any profits. https://games.amazon.com/

Ah, that explains why. And they might have some VR plays in mind, where it makes sense to have an engine they control

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

#83

Post by thenomad »

douche wrote: post #62
keyle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame about the 3D format supports. :(

Seems like they could throw in Assimp[1] and have most of the common formats out-of-the-box. [1] https://github.com/assimp/assimp

Huh, that's a very nice library I'd not seen before! Thanks.

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

#84

Post by vilya »

keyle wrote: post #14
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…

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.

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

#85

Post by vilya »

douche wrote: post #62
keyle wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame about the 3D format supports. :(

Seems like they could throw in Assimp[1] and have most of the common formats out-of-the-box. [1] https://github.com/assimp/assimp

I've never been able to get Assimp to successfully load anything other than .obj format models, despite what they claim in their docs. Last time I tried was about two years ago though, so maybe it's improved since then.

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

#86

Post by Slippery_John »

gravypod wrote: post #79
athrun wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly already have a SDK for Unity: https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-unity

Does this have support for their "auto scaling" back end? That is what interests me the most.

Doesn't look like it at the moment, though I imagine the .Net SDK will have support sooner rather than later. Hopefully they'll wrap GameLift into the unity sdk shortly thereafter, but to be honest I don't know where the difficulty lies in just using the regular .Net SDK.

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

#87

Post by dahart »

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, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

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

#88

Post by Slippery_John »

dharma1 wrote: post #53
benbristow wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cloud service offerings. They can make a killing off of hosting the game servers and backend APIs.

wouldn't it make more sense to focus on AWS offerings for Unity3D/Unreal Engine instead?

Well, since GameLift is engine agnostic you could use it in any engine, it would just not be so tightly integrated.

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

#89

Post by cies »

beefsack wrote: post #50
cies wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another fully open-source 3D engine is no bad thing. Small correction; it is not open source: https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/#Licensing

It is open source, but it's not FOSS.

From their FAQ:

> 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.

So according to them it's not even "open source".

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

#90

Post by BatFastard »

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?
Post reply on HN