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Amazon Launches Free Game Engine Lumberyard
Dave Knott writes: Amazon has both announced and released a new, free game engine, Lumberyard, which offers deep integration with its Amazon Web Services server infrastructure to empower online play, and also with Twitch, its video game-focused streaming service. Lumberyard is powerful and full-featured enough to develop triple-A current-gen console games, with mobile support is coming down the road. Its core engine technology is based on Crytek's CryEngine. However, Lumberyard represents a branch of that tech, and the company is replacing or upgrading many of CryEngine's systems. Monetization for Lumberyard will come strictly through the use of Amazon Web Services' cloud computing. If you use the engine for your game, you're permitted to roll your own server tech, but if you're using a third-party provider, it has to be Amazon. Integration of Amazon's Twitch video streaming tools at a low level also helps to cement that platform's dominance in the game streaming space. Alongside Lumberyard, the company has also announced and released GameLift, a new managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling server-based online games using AWS. GameLift will be available only to developers who use Lumberyard, though it's an optional add-on. The game engine is in beta, but is freely usable and downloadable today.
FaceBook's proprietary APIs died and reincarnated? Why do developers keep falling for these things?
Our new triple A rated three dimensional action game powered by Lumberyard under the hood.
It just makes me think of saw dust or Mendards/Home Depot
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
From https://aws.amazon.com/de/lumb... :
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.
Limberyard is gratis, and free as in beer, but it isn't free as in freedom.
It's not like wrapping "open source" around the marketeerspeak suddenly makes rainbow-farting unicorns spring out the woodwork causing sudden blindness to the obvious and willing abandonment of all reason or anything.
We still see what you did there. "Here, you now make game that brings us sales, hokay." At least zynga managed to get paid for their efforts.
PC, Playstation and Xbox support, Android and iOS in the wings... no specific mention of Windows Metro, Linux or OSX (I assume PC only means standard Windows).
Unity3D has all the bases covered, and a large number of third-party support through assets and plugins.
The CryEngine is certainly nice, though.
So it embraces aws growth for multiplayer, does it spawn additional servers if more players join? How many users can you have in a game? Can we have battles with thousands of users playing a fps in real time?
I can see why Amazon is releasing this, you are using aws services (with costs) and twitch, that uses aws servers.
Not sure this would be cheaper than dedicated game rental companies. But if auto spin up of instances for on demand growth is a real feature, that is pretty awesome.
Interesting! So it's not as free as the BSD or MIT licenses are, but it's not as restrictive as the GPL is, either. So it's somewhere between the two camps.
It's not like wrapping "open source" around the marketeerspeak suddenly makes rainbow-farting unicorns spring out the woodwork causing sudden blindness to the obvious and willing abandonment of all reason or anything.
Actually "open source" is a very powerful marketing stanza when targeting Linux guys. It creates a warm fuzzy feeling among them and a branding of high quality stuff. It's like the word "organic" when talking about health nuts.
C'mon Timmy, I know they've got you posting 24/7 but still...
Unicode support - we understand it's hard, we can wait.
But checking the English is something our new overlords could fix fast..
Yeah. Help Tor (definetely partner of Amazon) to spread out, assholes.
Uhhh.. yeah, gimme a sec I’m coming up with thirty-two point three three uh, repeating of course, percentage.
They are actually gamifying their warehouse stock management! The engine maps your game state onto a warehouse stock management problem, and successful moves by gamers are collected and transformed into a solution to the problem.
Because they are losing game developers out to Azure. Look at Titanfall, for an example (whether you like it or not is irrelevant).
The problem AWS has is that it is entirely VM/IaaS based. There is little to no PaaS offerings so developers have to write integration layers for the VMs and at many times, use more resources than they need. With PaaS services they can tailor it to be much more dynamic and that's the allure Azure brings them. The scaling can be elastic but also not waste any resources.
AWS is providing an engine that is really powerful, adding its customization so that the integration for Twitch and AWS is inherent, and hoping you sign on. Because if you do, you're going to pay more money to run your game and as a result, they will make money as well. That's why they can give it away and to boot -- not open source it.
That said I think most people would take the power, flexibility and ease of use of the Unreal Engine for 5% revenue share rather than pay 20% more on utilization on AWS. But that's just my logic talking.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Lots of "free" engines available these days, but it really ignores the real issue: CONTENT. You can get the best engine for free or extremely cheap (Lumberyard, UE4, Unity, etc) but if you don't have the art assets, story, and gameplay, the engine doesn't matter.
Engines are becoming a black box and selection of it is down on the bottom; you need the assets and those are a different skillset than engine creation/optimization.
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.
From: http://aws.amazon.com/service-...
And what about the revenues from the farming industry? Huge! But those greedy farmers keep all their proprietary software in huge data barns, where nobody can see it!
I think we can clearly see that industries that have fuck-all to do with computers are HOLDING OUT on us!
> Its core engine technology is based on Crytek's CryEngine
Was interested until this line.
My advice is to run away. Run very away.
http://ioquake3.org/ for all your free software game engine needs.
and I don't say that lightly. There's something off with the Cameras in every Unity game I've played. My bro thinks it's because they've written their code to be easy to port to mobile and there are too many limitations with that. Got me. But even Unity games I like (Wasteland II comes to mind) feel a tad clunkier than Unreal based equivalents. Unity space sims tend to feel more like first person shooters. That's more to the physics though but stil...
That said if my bro is right then Lumberyard might have the exact same problems. Unreal has it's share of problems too. I'm a console gamer at heart so I"m interested to see what the Japanese do with Unreal tech. As for Crytech, nice engine but like Idtech5 the dev tools suck for artists and if you're buying an engine then your artists probably have the toughest job on your team.
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