Amazon Lumberyard - Free*(conditions apply) game engine

Scott_Arm

Legend

So, this is weird. Totally free, unless you use amazon cloud for multiplayer. Based on Cryengine, or something.
 
Free*!









*:
Q. Can my Lumberyard game connect to services like Steamworks, Apple Game Center, Google Play Games, or console social services?
Yes. 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.

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.


From http://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/faq/
 
Interesting, so they give you everything to make a game, but lock you into AWS web services. Still not a bad option for indie type people, making single player games that wouldn't rely on any web services anyways.
 
Curious move for Crytek, but guess they're not really in the Indy space? And bigger devs would only use lumberjack if wanting to use Gamelift, which they presumably have a cut of?
 
The timing of the Crytek deal was when the company was in dire straights. I wonder if it was a last hurrah on engine licencing?

Lumberjack is now a branch of the tech. It doesn't sound like they have plans to keep it compatible, having already rewritten several components.
 
Yah, I'm curious about how Crytek is being compensated for this.
Aside from the $60-70M amazon gave them when they most needed the cash?
I'd assume wide use of your engine, a near guaranteed buyer for updates to the engine and helping AAA devs / asset store would be a fairly lucrative income stream too?
 
I'm posting in here so I can find this thread later and do more reading. Very interesting!
 
Aside from the $60-70M amazon gave them when they most needed the cash?
I'd assume wide use of your engine, a near guaranteed buyer for updates to the engine and helping AAA devs / asset store would be a fairly lucrative income stream too?

Didn't realize Amazon had floated Crytek like that. Kind of makes you wonder why they didn't just buy them outright. That's usually what Amazon would do.
 
I don't think the actual numbers were ever confirmed but it was a big chunk of cash at exactly the right moment (arguably slightly too late)
 
ah great another engine to test :) should be fun. What do you guys think UE4 or Lumbaryard for an Indi game? I like that lumberyard is based on Cry Engine, the learning cruve will be almost nil at least for my team and me, and no upfront costs, and multiplayer, MMO similar server costs, but no sharing of profits.

What would the benefits be with promotions etc?

Any ideas?
 
This is what Crytek should have done a long time ago but instead they kept dragging their feet with their own Indie SDK and now it's even inferior to that of a licensee.
 
Star Citizen used the CRYENGINE but they already changed >50% of the CRYENGINE code to build a first person universe game. They nor even done yet. Now they are running as Lumberyard engine.

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More information: http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/23/s...-42-are-using-amazons-lumberyard-game-engine/


There has been little change in itself.
For CIG, it remains basically the same engine up to the network stuff. However, what will change is the network structure. Probably CIG has cheaper access to severs? This would be god for an MMO with very high server costs. In return, Amazon could perhaps use technology from Star Citizen?

Amazon has advertised that they can edit terrain quickly. In SC, whole planets can be created quickly by hand with advanced tools.

Planet creator starts at 10:15:

It would be interesting to know whether anyone who uses the Lumberyard engine can have access to it at some point.
 
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I call shenanigans on this. I was under the impression that RSI had forked CryEngine years ago. Merging Lumberyard and RSI's changes would be incredibly difficult and take a lot of time for the RSI programming team.
 
Renderers etc. remain as they are. I guess it is only about the network implementation. In cloud computing Amazon is far ahead of all others such as Microsoft.

EDIT:

Roberts responded
Lumberyard and StarEngine are both forks from exactly the SAME build of CryEngine.

We stopped taking new builds from Crytek towards the end of 2015. So did Amazon. Because of this the core of the engine that we use is the same one that Amazon use and the switch was painless (I think it took us a day or so of two engineers on the engine team). What runs Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is our heavily modified version of the engine which we have dubbed StarEngine, just now our foundation is Lumberyard not CryEngine. None of our work was thrown away or modified. We switched the like for like parts of the engine from CryEngine to Lumberyard. All of our bespoke work from 64 bit precision, new rendering and planet tech, Item / Entity 2.0, Local Physics Grids, Zone System, Object Containers and so on were unaffected and remain unique to Star Citizen.

Going forward we will utilize the features of Lumberyard that make sense for Star Citizen. We made this choice as Amazon's and our focus is aligned in building massively online games that utilize the power of cloud computing to deliver a richer online experience than would be possible with an old fashioned single server architecture (which is what CryNetwork is).

Looking at Crytek's roadmap and Amazon's we determined that Amazon was investing in the areas we were most interested in. They are a massive company that is making serious investments into Lumberyard and AWS to support next generation online gaming. Crytek doesn't have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are. Because of this combined with the fact we weren't taking new builds of CryEngine we decided that Amazon would be the best partner going forward for the future of Star Citizen.

Finally there was no ulterior motive in the timing of the announcement. The deal wasn't fully finalized until after the release of 2.5 and we agreed with Amazon to announce the switch and partnership upon the release of 2.6, which would be the first release on Lumberyard and AWS. If you have been checking out our schedule updates you would know that we originally had hoped to release 2.6 at the beginning of December, not Friday the 23rd!

I hope this clears up some of the speculation I have seen. We are very excited to be partnered with Amazon and feel this move is a big win for Star Citizen and by extension everyone that has backed the project.

p.s. I wont be replying to this as it is Christmas and I am meant to be enjoying a bit of time off with my family (and playing some games - you may see me pop into a Star Marine or AC match or two!)

p.p.s Happy Holidays All!

CIG dev
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