by dshankar on 2/9/16, 8:36 AM with 177 comments
by dahart on 2/9/16, 3:44 PM
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.
by thenomad on 2/9/16, 10:39 AM
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.
by ascorbic on 2/9/16, 10:45 AM
by Grue3 on 2/9/16, 12:29 PM
>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 games with highest development budgets, why would they care about the engine being free? Clearly choosing a free engine is a cost-saving measure, at which point you're no longer making an AAA game by definition.
by julius on 2/9/16, 11:17 AM
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?
by markatkinson on 2/9/16, 12:45 PM
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 get out the box with UE for example are far superior to Unity.
Anyway, I just went off topic. It looks like an interesting option for developing multiplayer focused games.
by clebio on 2/9/16, 2:29 PM
I mean, the closest thing to a title for this linked page would be the subheading:
> Amazon Lumberyard is a free AAA game engine deeply integrated with AWS and Twitch – with full source.
by twoquestions on 2/9/16, 1:50 PM
Not to mention the free to try and mature tools that developers already have (Unity, Unreal Engine, etc.)
by shadowmint on 2/9/16, 11:22 AM
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.
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...
by JohnTHaller on 2/9/16, 4:39 PM
by usaphp on 2/9/16, 10:53 AM
by kderbe on 2/9/16, 10:43 PM
[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/245102/Sponsored_Amazon_i...
by jdoliner on 2/9/16, 10:38 AM
by spullara on 2/9/16, 8:50 PM
by meow_mix on 2/9/16, 5:28 PM
by gravypod on 2/9/16, 3:27 PM
by teamonkey on 2/9/16, 7:47 PM
by akerro on 2/9/16, 10:47 AM
I'm unable to connect there from mobile and desktop Firefox.
by sagivo on 2/9/16, 4:10 PM
by shmerl on 2/9/16, 9:51 PM
Other than that, what value does it offer on top of Cry Engine that it uses?
by wilhil on 2/9/16, 1:30 PM
by lobster_johnson on 2/9/16, 8:49 PM
by Kiro on 2/9/16, 8:19 PM
by theworstshill on 2/9/16, 3:22 PM
by zyngaro on 2/9/16, 1:12 PM