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Amazon Lumberyard: free AAA game engine with Oculus and AWS integration
- jdoliner 11y agoI'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.
- dennisnedry 11y agoLumberyard is not open source.
- jdoliner 11y agoYeah, I didn't read that very closely :-/ Still cool, but not as much as I'd thought.
- thenomad 11y agoDigging 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 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.
- patates 11y agoSo 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.
- sangnoir 11y ago> I wonder if it says something about the codebase. Well, this is Amazon we are talking about - they like dancing to the beat of their own drum. They also forked Android.
- Slippery_John 11y agoWell, the meaty bits that make Amazon money are all separated out into a service called GameLift and the C++ SDK.
- wlesieutre 11y agoAnother major engine fork is for Star Citizen / Squadron 42. 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.
- wlesieutre 11y agoThis sort of thing is actually pretty common in games; you end up doing some engine customization to fit your needs, and eventually you have to say "We've diverged too far to try and keep following the main updates anymore," and you stick with a customized version of an old release. Nearly every AAA game is going to fit into that pattern, it's just that the 64 bit coordinates overhaul in Star Citizen is probably a larger and lower level architectural change than what most things bother with.
- deleted 11y ago
- ascorbic 11y agoNote that it's "free, including all source code", but definitively not open source. https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/#Licensing https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/#Licensing
- patates 11y agoExactly. When people see "free, with source code included", they may tend to think that it is open-source. I hope this answer from their FAQ section clears it: 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.
- eterm 11y agoIt also contains built in obselesence: 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.
- Tepix 11y agoThat means if you keep releasing updates for a project for 5 years, you need renewed permission from them, right?
- jo909 11y agoUpdates would clearly not be an "initial public or commercial release of your Lumberyard Project". It's about the first version, you just can't sit on your project forever and still use an old version of the engine when you finally go public. I see no harm in that clause.
- cptskippy 11y agoThis is probably a way to limit supporting legacy versions of AWS as they anticipate the service will evolve over time. It also means that any game based on Lumberyard might not work past 5 years without continued developer updates.
- akerro 11y ago> Peer attempted old style (potentially vulnerable) handshake. (Error code: ssl_error_unsafe_negotiation) I'm unable to connect there from mobile and desktop Firefox.
- usaphp 11y agoIt's funny to see in that video how drastically different work environment is at "gunfire games" studio and twitch. Looks like day and night.
- julius 11y agoThe big question for me is: Why an entire engine? 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?
- athrun 11y agoThey certainly already have a SDK for Unity: https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-unity https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-unity
- gravypod 11y agoDoes this have support for their "auto scaling" back end? That is what interests me the most.
- Slippery_John 11y agoDoesn'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.
- ggambetta 11y agoYou may be interested in SpatialOS (http://improbable.io http://improbable.io). Disclaimer: I work there. Feel free to contact me directly if you need more info :)
- ckozlowski 11y agoYes. https://aws.amazon.com/gamelift/ https://aws.amazon.com/gamelift/
- obsurveyor 11y agoBusiness. Amazon re-invests almost all their profits in itself(Wall Street hates this a lot). Getting a sweetheart deal from a company about to go under to fill a gap in their software technology to grow out their game section was probably too hard to resist.
- shadowmint 11y agoSome interesting legal stuff with this engine, which their FAQ(1) goes over. 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. Is it a game changer? 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 https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/#licensing [2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/latest/userguide/lumberyard-alternate-web-services.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/latest/userguide/lumbe...
- Keyframe 11y agoAlso: You can use hardware you own and operate for your game servers. 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.
- douche 11y agoThat sounds like a Steam clause. At this point, if you're licensing a PC game engine, and it's not Steam-compatible, it's DOA.
- Grue3 11y agoThe wording is rather strange. >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.
- radiorental 11y agoDevils advocate: An argument could me made that this is a AAA grade engine, referring to it's capabilities not customers. Much like the US Army doesn't necessarily buy all clothing labeled 'Military Spec' or 'Tactical' etc
- dragonwriter 11y ago"Tactical" label is mostly empty fluff, "milspec" means it meets a published military specification -- which, absent specifying which specification, is also fluff. So, if the point of your analogy is that this use of the AAA label is empty fluff, then, mission accomplished.
- obsurveyor 11y agoIt's describing the engine and the games that have been produced with it, not necessarily the games that will be created with it in the future. Crysis 3 was definitely a AAA game.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- onion2k 11y agoThey mean the engine is capable of powering AAA titles (and it is, because it's CryEngine at heart). So users get that level of utility from something that doesn't cost anything.
- markatkinson 11y agoI got pretty excited and rushed through the article trying to clarify what engine and language it is based on. 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.
- ogsharkman 11y agoYeah, especially when you consider Carmack basically volunteered to rewrite Minecraft in C++ for Microsoft (and VR use). I'm not a game developer so I have no idea if C++ is as widespread as it seems but to me that's a pretty big indication.
- markatkinson 11y agoI spent some time going through tutorials for different game engines, UE, Unity, Chaos and researching others, it became pretty clear that C++ the most pervasive and valuable across them, which is probably obvious to some of the more involved players in that space.
- douche 11y agoI think it's become something of a chicken and egg problem. All the hard-core game developers moved up from assembly to C, then introduced bits of C++ in the late 90s. All the books and tutorials end up getting written in C++ (or C with classes...). APIs get written in C/C++. More people learn C++ because its what the game devs do, and it's harder to find resources on learning how to do it in any other language. It's usually possible to make a wrapper for C++ code in a managed language, but it's not easy, if somebody else hasn't made a good binding already. Garbage-collection has a bad name for some reason in game-dev circles, which maybe makes sense if you're developing a fast-twitch action game or shooter - a GC pause might drop enough frames to matter there, but for most games, Java or C# should be fine.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- zyngaro 11y agoFYI Microsoft.
- zyngaro 11y agoFYI Microsoft.
- wilhil 11y agoI hope their webpage isn't an indication of performance of EC2! I keep getting timeouts and errors :(
- twoquestions 11y agoI wonder why Amazon is going after game developers, as the gaming industry looks like a crowded and low-margin market. Not to mention the free to try and mature tools that developers already have (Unity, Unreal Engine, etc.)
- JshWright 11y ago> crowded and low-margin market Isn't that kind of Amazon's thing?
- benbristow 11y agoThe cloud service offerings. They can make a killing off of hosting the game servers and backend APIs.
- dharma1 11y agowouldn't it make more sense to focus on AWS offerings for Unity3D/Unreal Engine instead?
- benbristow 11y agoAs 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/ https://games.amazon.com/
- dharma1 11y agoAh, that explains why. And they might have some VR plays in mind, where it makes sense to have an engine they control
- Slippery_John 11y agoWell, since GameLift is engine agnostic you could use it in any engine, it would just not be so tightly integrated.
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- sneezeplease 11y agoThis looks awesome ignoring minor technical aspects
- clebio 11y agoMinor nit: the link doesn't once mention Oculus. Only on the FAQ page is that mentioned. http://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/ http://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/ 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.
- theworstshill 11y agoNot 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.
- gravypod 11y agoWhat 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.
- mjblack 11y agoAWS autoscaling is service that can be used to scale applications based on different metrics, one being CPU load and another is ELB traffic. I'm sure there is probably more options but the idea is it scales up and down depending on the policies put in place. It'll launch either VMs or containers, which is really how you design the autoscaling configuration.
- dahart 11y agohttps://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ 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.
- BatFastard 11y agoThat's really in there! There are lawyers with a sense of humor?
- TranquilMarmot 11y agoMaybe they're coming out with a zombie game...?
- outworlder 11y agoNot just lawyers. Someone in charge must have authorized that. Which is, frankly speaking, amazing! Too many companies are too serious for their own good, it's a refreshing change.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoOccam's razor makes me think it was slipped in by some web developer.
- porkloin 11y agoJust curious - why am I suddenly seeing so many people referencing occam's razor? It is happening way too frequently to be a coincidence. Was the idea featured someplace recently? It seems like just about every tech-ish thread on reddit and HN has one "Occam's Razor" dude for the last couple weeks.
- sagivo 11y agoIt's about time we'll have some choice and better competition after Unity3d basically dominated the market.
- JohnTHaller 11y agoIt's an interesting ploy by Amazon to get game devs to lock themselves into Amazon's AWS for backend and Amazon's Twitch for streaming.
- meow_mix 11y agoSure 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
- teamonkey 11y agoThe 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.
- leetNightshade 11y agoThat support should be coming. As far as I heard, they're trying to create one cross platform gaming ecosystem based on their services/platforms. From the FAQ: "Mobile support for iOS and Android devices is coming soon, along with additional support for Mac and Linux."
- Kiro 11y agoHow does the automatic lag compensation work?
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag#Solutions_and_lag_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag#Solutions_and_lag_compensa...
- lobster_johnson 11y agoI wonder how suitable this is for 2D development. Anyone know?
- leetNightshade 11y agoOn the main page Lumberyard is described as a 3D game engine, which is the case because it's based off of the 3D CryEngine game engine. 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.
- spullara 11y agoThey recommend using an operating system (Windows 7) for which mainstream support ended over a year ago.
- whitegrape 11y agoExtended support until 2020 though. :) Personally I have no need for Windows 10 on anything I own or use, maybe MS will offer something better by 2020.
- shmerl 11y agoAWS integration sounds like a vendor lock-in to me. Other than that, what value does it offer on top of Cry Engine that it uses?
- kderbe 11y agoMy 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 after the game itself is released, so I wonder what their motivations are for promoting the standalone engine so soon. [1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/245102/Sponsored_Amazon_is_now_hiring_for_its_first_PC_game.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/245102/Sponsored_Amazon_i... [2] https://games.amazon.com/jobs/ https://games.amazon.com/jobs/