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.
Relevant page: https://www.khronos.org/openglsc/
Example companies doing that stuff:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110224145307/http://www.altsof...
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.
Small correction; it is not open source: https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/#Licensing
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.
Well, this is Amazon we are talking about - they like dancing to the beat of their own drum. They also forked Android.
More competition is good. It means Unity won't be able to stand still and we'll get to see more features and interesting ideas. Cloud + Twitch integration? Pretty cool!
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.
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.
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-AWS web service that is similar
to or can act as a replacement for Amazon EC2, Amazon Lambda,
Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon EC2
Container Service, or Amazon GameLift. You can use hardware you
own and operate for your game servers.
Q. Is it okay for me to use my own servers?
Yes. You can use hardware you own and operate for your game. 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. 57.6 Registration; Release. Before distributing your
Lumberyard Project to End Users, you must register it at
aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/registration. You must obtain our
prior written consent if the initial public or commercial
release of your Lumberyard Project is based on a version of
the Lumberyard Materials more than 5 years old.That clause does not require any existing games to be updated.
>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.
Lumberyard looks like it's mostly CryEngine plus extras, and CryEngine has been used for a number of "triple A" games for a decade now. (including recent titles like Crysis 3, Ryse: Son of Rome, Star Citizen, Evolve, Homefront, State of Decay, etc).
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.
So, if the point of your analogy is that this use of the AAA label is empty fluff, then, mission accomplished.
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?
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.
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)
On the other hand, Blueprints and the node-based material editor are really nice for quickly snapping content together.
Yea I think it is about time I gave Unity another go, and will set aside some time to go over some tutorials.
I just recall doing things like setting up path finding and AI was much easier in UE and setting up player characters etc was all already built into UE templates.
The whole UE IDE or workflow also just made more sense to me, and was more polished. Maybe I just didn't give Unity enough of a chance.
edit: I am a Java guy myself, and would like to do some amateur gamedev in that direction (online FPS), but im worried about above mentioned point.
Not really. If you look to the future, I'd recommend Rust for making game engines. They by nature should be latency sensitive, and any kind of non deterministic behavior caused by garbage collector is really unacceptable.
Not everywhere. Phones, tablets and older or low end laptops are very popular.
Apparently we need to go through this cycle every few decades.
You surely need it if you plan to work on high performance engines. Hopefully Rust will find its place there as well.
If you are coding with others, be prepared to deal with some kind of C with classes.
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.
Not to mention the free to try and mature tools that developers already have (Unity, Unreal Engine, etc.)
Isn't that kind of Amazon's thing?
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...
So, it's a fair deal. You can use your own servers and not AWS for anything, but you can't use other web services which are competing with AWS. You can also modify source code as you see fit, but not distribute it. That's about it. Can't complain.
[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/245102/Sponsored_Amazon_i...
Still cool, but not as much as I'd thought.
From the FAQ: "Mobile support for iOS and Android devices is coming soon, along with additional support for Mac and Linux."
I'm unable to connect there from mobile and desktop Firefox.
Other than that, what value does it offer on top of Cry Engine that it uses?
If they're to add 2D support, it'll probably be a while. And it'll likely be something built using the 3D technology, unless they want to put in a lot of work to optimize for a 2D use.