Lumberyard: Amazon's CryEngine-based engine with free source code

@ShadowK keep coughing. There is a drug to cure that

 

Geez it took ages to get to Paragon 41 and always played the mage, I didn't love D3 but I couldn't stop playing it. Very odd..

@Archania

Ummm chicken soup?

 

with extra noodles.

 

Yeah you can run into those slow periods for sure. My favorite character is my Monk. He doesn't move very fast but he rarely takes any damage and can mow things down fairly quick.

A little video I made just a few minutes ago to remind you how cool the game is. Got lucky and this T9 rift run just happened to be the cows. I didn't kill 100 before the timer ran out mainly because like I said my monk moves slow. He is a patient fella. lol Experience is good on T9. I haven't tried any higher yet. But anyway watch the experience bar.

Alright and this is the end of my interruption of the previously scheduled Lumberyard discussion.

 

Meh... i'll keep an eye on it

 

Amazon has been buffing up on games ever since they launched the Fire, not too surprising they trying to move into something a bit more beefier. Their cloud product line makes the most money(as in profit) in the entire company last time I checked so driving more customers to it is just good business.

 

Allright so I've spent a few hours with it and.... it's one of the most disappointing things I've ever seen. The user experience is as if we're back in 1996. Very unintuitive, unpolished, cryptic errors popping up left and right while you play, underwhelming samples, etc, etc.... even the damn launcher is a batch file. I mean... who does that in this day and age?

I am now fairly certain that there is no way in hell this will be better than UE4 or Unity in the forseeable future. Seriously, Lumberyard has pretty much zero advantage over those two, aside from all the AWS stuff. UE4 is just as visually impressive and much more satisfying to work with, and Unity is 100x easier to use while being powerful enough for most indie devs.

And, by the way, the install size is 40 GB

 

Welcome to CryEngine.

 

Saved me a job there, thanks ..

 

Excuse me, can I use C# with lumberyard? I can not find any docs regarding this

 

It will be interesting to see if this will wind up affecting Unitys pricing. If Amazon uses its resources to make a nice user interface for it then its hard to see how Unity will be able to keep charging $4500 for base + mobile licenses when there is free CryEngine based option.

 

oh dear! somebody is not aware Unity is free

 

This is what I'm curious about. From what I gather on the main information page, there is NO scripting language - just a visual scripting tool. Other than that, you can mess with the engine C++ source itself.

Anyway, downloading it to have a poke around. Guess I'll find out the answer soon enough.

 

Because you never used CryEngine
It is complicated but once you start digging and learning you can achieve really good results and take advantage of AI and things like covers systems and others.

Are all super plugins free ?

It doesn't has any official C# support, if there is some wrapper it must not cover all the needs perhaps.
You must use flowgraphs or C++ ,perhaps Lua but i am not sure all needs are covered by Lua also.

I just get my hands on it, and it produces really nice graphics and it is really fast on small hardware, you have advanced terrain, real time GI , Geometry tools like BSP editing , LOD tool and many more.
Still the editor needs lot of work (command lines to make the package, still stuck to Maya and Photoshop etc ... ).
And documentation , examples , community makes a big difference.

But who knows if i will not have later some project fitting with this free version of CryEngine ?
More choice is always better for us.

 

Does it have 64 bit precision?

 

Since Lumberyard is based on Cry Engine, is there any difference between those two?

 

Well, you could make a script or program that checks usage of EC2 and send you warnings at specific goalposts, e.g. 75% used, 80% used, 95% used. This way you can either clean it up or purchase more in advance. Same for bandwidth as I'm sure Amazon has an API with which you can check it.

 

I've asked around in the forums and apparently Lua is an option.

 

I really like how Unity does Blender support. Just drop in .blend file and you're good to go. I hope Amazon will make something similar.

 

No, Unity is not free. There is a free version that you can use if you or your organization make less than 100K per year and you don't mind a splash screen that labels you as an amateur. To get rid of that screen, which you need to do if you want your app to look professional, you will have to pay $4500 for mobile licensees. That is very far from free. The Lumber Yard engine is free period.

 

Frankly, I don't mind splash per se, only Personal Edition thing. I didn't mind it in 4.x period, maybe a bit when started, but that personal thing is BS. I'll probably finish off my current game in Unity, then will jump the ship to either Lumberyard or Source 2 (if it'll be released by that time, remember - Valve Time). Would also consider Xenko, but at that point licensing situation is unclear and they've said they might start charge for it in future.

 

Equally as incorrect as saying Unity is free. Lumberyard is free unless you want to use online services of any kind. In which case you must use AWS (and only AWS unless you're willing and/or able to negotiate special and expensive terms with Amazon), which is definitely not free.

 

Yeah, so I gave it a thorough look over and here's what I think:

1) No asset store.
2) No support.
3) The forums are a complete disaster.
4) The user interface looks like a nightmare, just like it was in CryEngine.
5) Developing and play testing looks ridiculously tedious.
6) Everything that it has for it you can do just as well with Unity or Unreal.
7) Way too much push for the premium features. Like every where I turn they shoehorn in talking about the pay for features.
8) You can't even run the engine off of a virtual desktop on their cloud.

PASS.

PSST- Hey Unity! Could you guys develop letting us run Unity on a virtual desktop via HTML5?

 

No, Lumberyard IS FREE. No one said you didn't have to pay for amazons AWS servers if you wanted to do multiplayer just like you would have to pay if you used Proton or some other gaming server company for your Unity game. Even if you do multiplayer you don't have to use AWS, as long as you use your own servers its free. The only restriction is that you can't go out to another third party company for networking services.

 

Nope. You can roll your own servers. You can't use things like Azure though.

 

What is $4500 for mobile if you earned more than 100 000$ ? You just pay one time 4500$ and can make additionnal projects without paying more.

You would say the same things about actual CryEngine subscription, because you never used CryEngine, it's a hard to use engine , all learning docs , finding tutorials or import art and use the engine is up to you. But some indidviduals are able to use it really well.
I agree, this is not for everyone or beginners.
You could compare it to Blender and Maya, Blender has more features than Maya LT but it asks a longer learning curve and it is not as intuitive to use in many areas.

This is the way they can get money from the engine if they will really manage to bring it to a better level than it is. It stays a good solution for solo games and skilled people able to use it.

The only concerns are :
- will they change the engine editor tools to something less outdated from years ?
- Will they have a real community and growing documentation and forums ?
- Some Asset Store to come ?
- Will they do good regular releases with some new features ?
- Always stuck to their web services for multiplayer ?

Today this is a non prooven solution that needs to adress above issues.

 

They have an explanation on their site as to why you can't throw in an 'off switch' when you reach your cap. I'm just not satisfied with it. I probably could use an amazon api to check the caps and then somehow shut down all of my projects, but it won't be as neat as some solution by amazon that let you configure what serves to stop running when certain caps are met.

 

At least they support mods

 

C# is provided by a third party, it's not an official integration. It's not a wrapper but a Mono binding, it comes with C++ and LUA..

 

What do you mean by this? The free version is not full?

 

I for one think their licensing is absolutely genius. Many games need to have some kind of backend, so providing services for that integrated into the engine, and solely taking revenue from that is a really smart move. It makes a lot of sense.

Full source code is amazing for community efforts, and no need to bake lighting is a huge time saver.

That said, I know for a fact that CryEngine it is nowhere near as lightweight or easy to use as Unity. But if amazon manages to build a community, and prove themselves to be dedicated in improving LumberYard, I can definitely see myself consider it for future projects.

I think this is great too, because it puts further pressure on Unity to do what has to be done to open up their engine. They'll have to do it at some point if they intend to stay in business.

 

@SunnySunshine I'm more of a LAN kind of guy so I'm not into it Amazon is a great backend option but.... eh

 

So surprising news.. finally amazon even start to march to game developement field? incredible... Anyway, lumberyard support C#? I don't know C++... And how about scripting editor? Does it support Visual Studio? or?

 

1) It'll come, believe me.. It's still revenue, but anyway what happend to y'know making your own assets for your own game?
2) There are various tiers of support and a support forum
3) Can't disagree there
4) Because it is CryEngine?
5) Yup, but it's wooorrthh it..
6) MMM, no you can't actually.. Especially with comparitive performance.
7) Company wants to make money, shocker..
8) Thank goodness for that.

@Emlar1028

Some but not that many it seems.

 

The problem I see here with this new engine is the same as stingray. No real documentation, video tutorials and a similar visual scripting like stingray.

Game engines use to be operated by programmers and artist had to depend on this to get things done.
A game engine should be very artist friendly like maya, photoshop, etc. It should not be technical or force the artist to
learn coding.
Why do you guys think clickteam fusion, construct 2, gamesald and others are still in business and have huge communities. Unity and Unreal will remain for the mainstream, the go to engine for many years to come.
Amazon needs make the game engine as artist friendly as possible. At the end is the artist who is creating the look and feel, expression of the game and not the programmer. Visual scripting is the future in not just game design, but in software creation. The programmers make the tools, but is the artist who mainly use it.

 

It doesn't matter how mush money the company has or how powerful the game engine is.
Is about two things, the vision and the passion.
The vision to see what a game engine should be. A creation tool with no technical bounds like photoshop,etc.
The passion to dedicate and invest in the community that will give back what you put in. No videos, no docs for starters.

 

Thing is, it's much more art friendly than Unity or Unreal.. It has pre-made drag and drop shading nodes for pretty much anything, in-built river / ocean / spline tools an absolutley awesome terrain system. It doesn't require any special lightmapping considerations, it is what you see is what you get WYSIWYG..

On top of that it has a full character biped and quadraped system / destruction / fully built in mesh creation tools for level design.

It's about the only engine I know of that you can just slap in whatever and it looks good without any real effort whatsoever.

The only place it suffers is the Import pipeline, because it's based around Max / Maya.. You can literally do everything in it from socketing and material transfers with Max / Maya, but the issue is you HAVE to do it in Max / Maya.

Now the scripting / coding side.. That's where CE becomes problematic.

 

Wow, you had my drooling like a dog for a while, almost choke on my own saliva, until you slap me at the end with the coding jumbo.
Is sounds like the engine is a but-her-face. If amazon with all their power can't see this, than is disaster for them also.

 

, doing basic stuff in LUA and Flowgraph is fine (like open door / load level / basic raycasting). It's when you want to do anything interesting, there's no documentation for it and trying to figure it out is a mare compared to Unity and / or Unreal..

 

If I can't harness the power of the engine in any real way, then why even waste precious time. If the engine ever gets to the level of Unity's ease of use and documentation or Unreal's powerful scripting then I'll take it out for a test drive.
I only been around for a little over a year, but from what I've seen so far the leading game engines are the one's that are neck deep in all things game developing. You could build a space ship, but nobody will understand its power until you show them how to properly use it.

 

Ye, 38.7 GB on disk plus the original 10GB compressed download, plus a list of prerequisite libraries and plugins. It is asking for the autodesk FBX SDK so it looks like FBX support at least (would be pretty crappy without imo).

Having just 'found' 50GB on my SSD I will need to poke around a bit more to manage the prereqs and have swap space so it will keep but looking around the folder structure Lua and Python seem to be supported .

Anyway, maybe later and not on a portable so will be keeping the installer (downloading was a real pain for some reason...)

 

I've noticed people mentioning Unity's lack of access to the source code a lot over the past year or so. Could be completely wrong but I'm guessing they are probably working toward that.

When your engine is closed source you are judged solely on the value of the game engine itself. When the source is available then you also get people judging you based on it. I've worked with countless devs over the years who although they have something working when asked "can you commit it today?" come back with "I've got some cleanup to do first". Like I said I could be completely off base but I just have the impression of programmers scrambling to clean up any messes in preparation for an inevitable release.

 

Sorry but you're wrong

You can use this to make plenty of money. You can use it to make say 50,000 dollars and owe nobody a single dime, ever and walk off into the sunset like a boss.

That. Is. Free. Gratis. No strings. Get it right, I'm tired of people saying Unity free isn't free. For you, for 99% of people on these forums, that's free. Also it's 100% factually free as well. A clause, or condition for something that does not apply to you doesn't change it's present state. If your income is under 100k, it is free. It is not retroactive. It doesn't apply to games you already launched.

Have fun with Lumbering Yardies charging you for any kind of multiplayer or persistence online though. Or have fun rolling your own servers at your own expense... That's fine. That's gratis, right, since you will never be making multiplayer games. Ooh no.

 

It's a waste of time to reason with users like that, hippocoder. They are hung up on the whole "logo splash-screen" thing. They will never be satisfied so long as that exists. For them the labeling, and the professional "status" that goes along with it will always be more important. That kind of user cares far more about what other people think of them than they do about the game they are creating. There's never any reasoning with people like that. Status and prestige will always trump practicality in their minds.

 

I was already expecting big game engine news at GDC this year. Lumberyard has stirred things up a bit more.

 

There's one thing I don't get, they keep dishing out these new engines to Indie's but missing the mark every time. For the PC / Console market, you want the tools of Unreal with the realtime rendering power of CryEngine topped off with Unity's ease of use. Sprinkle in a decent support infrastructure and hey presto.!

Paying $70Mil for an engine notorious for being a true old style "AAA" engine, which just means PITA to use seems a little odd really. For that money and the rest in development costs to put it right, you could hire the best in the business to wipe the floor with the competition..

 

Well at least Lumberyard has a dark interface but guess that's a mute point though.
And unity can't do full source code due to the 3rd party stuff or again do people not understand that...

 

I'm hoping Unity is able to eventually work around issues with 3rd party and provide as much source as possible, but I think this is quite a time consuming endeavour no doubt. It's proven to be beneficial to have users contribute fixes back. Bitbucket is slowly growing.

Remember folks, none of these engines are open source, just have source available. I think that's very valuable for everyone concerned.

 

Lumberyard doesn't sound very green. It's like Amazon is cutting down its own forest.

 

Well, technically Godot is open-source. But that's one of the most indie options currently available. (very, very little commercial support) Personally, I've always found full source code access to be less of an issue. So long as there is a solid scripting system in place, my needs are covered. I'm more of a content creator and a designer. As such, I'm quite happy to leave most of the back-end heavy-lifting coding to more capable professionals. Front-end development and tool development is what I prefer to work on anyway.

I'm quite happy to see the numerous options for developers cropping up. More competition will keep everyone on their toes, and incentivizes the involved parties to keep their offerings lean and focused. This is a good thing for developers who need solid middleware in order to thrive. (such as myself) So I heartily applaud Amazon's attempt to enter this space, whether they succeed or not.