Lumberyard - Amazon's Free game engine..

Just saw this:

http://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/

Based on Cryengine apparently, and includes source code…

Looking at the video, it looks very promising. Let’s hope it will we a good companion with Blender.

A windows only application. It’s not that in 2016 we’ve got the tools to make cross platform editors. Way to go amazon.

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.

So if you make multiplayer games you have to use their stuff, which may or may not be what you want.

Also the engine only seems compatible with Maya at the moment so at this time you’re screwed if you use blender.

And finally, why would I go with this engine instead of UE4 or Unity?

Q. Do I have to run my game on AWS?
No. If you own and operate your own private servers, you do not need to use AWS. You also don’t need to use AWS if your game does not use any servers. For example, if you release a free-standing single‐player or local-only multiplayer game, you pay us nothing.
Q. Is there a surcharge or other additional fee over and above AWS service rates for Lumberyard customers?
No.

That’s nice. They seem serious about this engine too.

Competition. Cryengine was always off limits for indie devs. Also it’s free for single player. Most indie devs are single player game makers.

Another thing that seems worrying is that you can’t comment on their youtube videos. It makes sense I guess (new engine and all) but it isn’t exactly promising.

Also since it’s completely free they don’t have a revenue stream except for multiplayer AWS servers, so if everyone just makes single player games they’re screwed. :stuck_out_tongue:

I guess their hope is that people will make multiplayer games and pay them money for hosting the servers but if the engine is good enough remains to be seen. Anyways, until there is at least .FBX (or some other) import it’s not very interesting for blender users.

You can run you own multiplayer servers/hardware if you so choose:
"
Q. Do I have to run my game on AWS?
No. If you own and operate your own private servers, you do not need to use AWS.
"

But of course you can’t choose to use Azure for instance.

Yeah, I interpreted that as “Yes, if they’re yours and in your home.” basically, hehe. But it may be more of a useful feature if you don’t want to setup servers by yourself, instead you just let Amazon handle it for you. Price may be a concern though, but I’m not sure how much multiplayer servers cost anyway. Maybe it’s really cheap and a really useful feature.

No serious PC gaming happens outside of the Windows OS. I’m pretty sure they made a safe bet here.

I like Unreal Engine 4 very much (specially for Arch-vis), but this Free beast Lumberyard (Based on Cryengine)? i do not know, one thing I am sure is UE is really good engine, but %5 gross revenue of 3000 per quarter is something lots of people do not like, specially tax and bank calculation stuff. I am going to test Lumberyard to see how it is for my personal game project (though I tested cryengine 3 years ago and I didnt like it)!

Gamesfromscratch just did an in-depth guide to downloading and installing Lumberyard
http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2016/02/09/Hands-On-With-The-Lumberyard-Game-Engine.aspx

It might actually take a while for users to actually get to where they have the editor open, because in addition to downloading a 10GB file (which might take a while unless you have one of those 1 gigabit connections), you will also need to download a bunch of third party tools (some of which require you to make an account on its site first) and then make an account with Amazon.

So in a way, those who expect a simple download > extract > use process like with Blender are going to be disappointed (but supposedly you then have Crytek’s old AAA game tools with some of the cruft removed). I also wouldn’t be surprised to not see any community-powered development either (as with Unreal 4) as Amazon placed a few restrictions on what you can do with a copy of the source. Amazon’s FAQ even explicitly states that the engine is not Open Source in the usual sense.

Does this means for opening the Editor user should always have connection?

interesting, so why they call free and open source then? is it really free, if user make a game, only single player?

I can’t say I know all of the details because I haven’t gone that much in depth (but chances are there will be a lot of other people who will find all of the details and whether there are any ‘catches’ that matter to developers).

It is free and limited open source:

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.

It’s free for single player games, local multiplayer games or regular multiplayer games if the servers are your own (which means no external sites). Otherwise you’ll have to pay for their multiplayer server solution.

So, this is a CryEngine fork by Amazon geared at cloud integration, which is where Amazon is going to make its money. Obviously, this is where Amazon is going to focus development effort, too. This isn’t something aimed at hobbyists or even small teams. CryEngine never had a foothold there, either.

Gamesfromscratch just did an in-depth guide to downloading and installing Lumberyard
http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/…me-Engine.aspx

This actually made me chuckle. One might get the idea that without download 10+ GBs of who-knows-what plus multiple large dependencies (some of them proprietary), you can’t do AAAA development from your garage anymore.

interesting, so why they call free and open source then? is it really free, if user make a game, only single player?

They don’t call it “open source”. In fact, they explicitly say it is not “open source”. It is free to use (on the assumption that time is free). UE4 and Unity also require account registration, by the way.

Along the lines of what I quested before, you can make a multiplayer game: LAN, WAN servers in your home, or servers in a data centre ​if you own the hardware. So you can setup your own multiplayer, but you would have to use/write your own server and own the server hardware,. It’s just saying you can’t use any other cloud providers if your going to use cloud.

I believe many data centres allow you to place your own rack servers inside them, and you simply pay for the space/bandwidth your servers consume.

Edit: Though Amazons point of view on that would be important :slight_smile:

According to the Unity forums, it gets worse than that as far as size goes as the full, extracted install closes in at 40 gigabytes.

By all means, Lumberyard looks to be one of the biggest single applications ever made in terms of size (unless it comes with a pile of assets, but what exactly would lead it to needing that much space)?

Also the extracted files are 40 GB lol