<a href="https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/</a><p>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.
Digging into the details, it seems this is largely a fork or adaption of the CryEngine, with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.
Note that it's "free, including all source code", but definitively not open source. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/#Licensing" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/#Licensing</a>
The wording is rather strange.<p>>free AAA game engine<p>Doesn't being called that require that there are AAA games developed with it? According to wikipedia,<p>"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."<p>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.
The big question for me is: Why an entire engine?<p>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?
I got pretty excited and rushed through the article trying to clarify what engine and language it is based on.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Anyway, I just went off topic. It looks like an interesting option for developing multiplayer focused games.
Minor nit: the link doesn't once mention Oculus. Only on the FAQ page is that mentioned.
<a href="http://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/</a><p>I mean, the closest thing to a title for this linked page would be the subheading:<p>> Amazon Lumberyard is a free AAA game engine deeply integrated with AWS and Twitch – with full source.
I wonder why Amazon is going after game developers, as the gaming industry looks like a crowded and low-margin market.<p>Not to mention the free to try and mature tools that developers already have (Unity, Unreal Engine, etc.)
Some interesting legal stuff with this engine, which their FAQ(1) goes over.<p>Basically, use it for whatever, free of charge, but not with any other cloud services that mimic amazon's services(2).<p>Except cloud services for some things, which are fine:<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
Is it a game changer?<p>Hard to say, but like they say, you can't beat free.<p>If nothing else, a <i>lot</i> of people are going to download this and have a look at it and mess around with it.<p>Pretty exciting stuff. :)<p>[1] <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/#licensing" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/#licensing</a><p>[2] <a href="http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/latest/userguide/lumberyard-alternate-web-services.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/latest/userguide/lumbe...</a>
It's funny to see in that video how drastically different work environment is at "gunfire games" studio and twitch. Looks like day and night.
My guess is Amazon plans to use this engine for their in-development AAA PC game [1][2] announced last year. Usually the engine spin-off happens <i>after</i> the game itself is released, so I wonder what their motivations are for promoting the standalone engine so soon.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/245102/Sponsored_Amazon_is_now_hiring_for_its_first_PC_game.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/245102/Sponsored_Amazon_i...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://games.amazon.com/jobs/" rel="nofollow">https://games.amazon.com/jobs/</a>
I'm pretty wowed.The quality of code that's being opensourced lately really seems to be ticking up. I didn't take the time to play with it so I'll be interested to hear the first reactions but it certainly looks pretty good in the screenshots. And integration directly into AWS could really streamline a lot of the difficulty of making online multiplayer games. I suspect this will put a new class of games in reach for indie development which is going to be really cool.
Sure it can't be redistributed, but if it could wouldn't someone just repackage it and make it such that you didn't have to use AWS for the servers? Their goal is to make game devs go to AWS, so this makes sense to me
What is this auto-scaling back end system about? How does it work? Does it just launch more nodes in a cluster or does it actually expand the VM that you are running in like expanding an OVZ container.
The thing I find weird about this is how Lumberjack is not compatible with any of Amazon's own devices. I would have expected their engine to support Fire tablets and Fire TV, at least.
> Peer attempted old style (potentially vulnerable) handshake. (Error code: ssl_error_unsafe_negotiation)<p>I'm unable to connect there from mobile and desktop Firefox.
Not even going to try it on principle. Amazon is a big tentacled octopus thats tightening its grasp over any and every area it can. Lets leave Amazon for ecommerce and AWS.