Amazon launches "free" Lumberyard

http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/9/10948580/amazon-game-engine-lumberyard

sort of... free..

apparently another great tool. based on cryengine, but including engine source. https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/

of all the companies out there...
amazon tops epic on licensing of an AAA engine.

Looks interesting... Funny thing to me is that 3 days ago I said to my Wife, "I can't believe Amazon hasn't tried cornering the game dev/supply market yet." Here they are...

hehe, you should be hired by a business plan prediction department in the gaming industry

I think, the guys at Amazon really want to sell their web services, and badly need games for their cheap console-like set-top-box called Fire TV...

https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/

cool, freely can be used to control weapons in case of a zombie apocalypse

, Lumberjack and the zombie apocalypse

ps: Amazon has surprisingly quite a bit of synergies with Lumberyard and their other products (their web services, Twitch, their stores etc.). Will be interesting to see if they can compete with Unreal and Unity.

one funny thing is that Epic started to integrate Twitch, but the Twitch SDK was withdrawn not a long time ago, so it has been stopped...

imo AWS integration is cool if you don't want to maintain your own server park. and selling games at Amazon could be something like Steam integration, but probably easier to implement networking stuff thanks to the integration with AWS.

but the workflow is the same as of Cryengine, you need Max or Maya, and maybe Photoshop too. but the audio and GUI system are custom, which is a step forward (as I remember CryEngine uses something for audio that requires a license, and the UI stuff is Flash/Angelscript, but not for sure, I checked it a long time ago).

to be honest I'm currently satisfied with UE4, except the high hardware requirements, but this lumberthingie has even higher.

I never tried Cryengine myself, I can see that its main disadvantage would be to set-up/learn interface and workflow/toolset. And probably documentation too. I always saw Cryengine purely for AAA companies, Unity for indies and some AAA, and Unreal somewhere between. But perhaps Lumberyard will attract indie lumberjacks, only jack knows.

about 2 years ago I bought a CryEngine book very cheap (< 3 USD), and tried the SDK (it was free at that time), but was unable to set up the asset pipeline, even after I installed some software without very clean licensing background (of course I removed them afterwards). from the programming side Lua seems to be a bit annoying interim step, the book mentioned it as much slower than C++, so better to minimize its usage, just link the C++ stuff via Lua. probably fine and fast for prototyping.

personally I liked the editor, but did nothing deep. and the lack of documentation and tutorials kept me to stay with 3dgs, and then started with UE4 immediately when it was released, whose programming was also difficult for me in the beginning (and was undocumented). it requires a lot of reading and planning before moving on, but recently I have started to enjoy it as I remember Unity3 was much easier to start with, but the Pro price of 3-4 was too high, and 5 came too late after UE4 to try.

I read a book about game engine development some time ago, and they integrated LUA as scripting option.

The main idea behind this was that you can change things on the fly without need for recompiling (and even restarting I think).

In the end every engine needs some tiem and work to get into. At some point suddenly you understand the workflow and it will be a lot easier to continue. Especially with a well documented engine used by many people.
Google -> Stackoverflow -> Refactor

nice business oriented dicision from amazon , they are so under rated .

yeah lua is pretty much the commonly accepted scripting integration among engines , and other types of applications .

in game engines it is mostly used for small scripts where the requirement of said script is not computationaly expensive , the usual approach is to keep your main code in languages such as c++ , and only option to use lua in engines for small operations .

the last engine i downloaded that i thought is going to rock the world ,was havok's project anarchy , which "concluded" a while back , i have to say i expected more from those guys regarding the lack of proffesionality on the release of project anarchy , i could not even find working links for forums or such , and there were some unexpected oddities during and after installation .

havok released quite a good version of the engine though ,also very component based and such but quite complicated when it comes to project setup / building and coding .

seems like everyone wants to jump in the mobile support pool but not all jump very gracefully.

LOL!

No doubt Amazon's product will do well. Amazon has pretty much unlimited resources to develop, fund, support, and market anything. Much bigger pool of talent and $$$$ to draw from.

I'm surprised they didn't initially pursue buying out 3Dgamestudio.... Since it so bug free and user friendly.

, exactly, they are so big, and could use their products/amazon for advertising aswell

, interesting thought if it would been done in ~2011-2013, though they would have needed to replace Lite-C or heavily upgrade it plus things like add support for other platforms which is no minor deal (I quess), and ofcourse upgrade/replace the toolset (WED/MED).