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

Maybe Epic Games and Unity secretly teamed up and worked out a deal with amazon to take out the competition.

 

Lumberyard would become like Torque 3D, people could use it and choose to continue supporting it.
The engine is fast on older hardware , it delivers real time GI and no baking, terrain , road , water , it has lot of tools out of the box, this would be a strong open source engine if Amazon would drop it

 

I still find it so odd they decided to buy a freaking game engine as a way to sell their backend services, as someone else pointed out earlier in this thread. Surely, if it's the backend services they want to sell, they'd profit more providing plugins to all engines?

Considering this, and reading your comment above makes me wanna think twice before investing time into LumberYard.

 

They are also making games.

 

They don't need to kill it off since it's used in house. This is actually the primary point.

 

That's what they told me, they said they're in it for the long run.. It makes sense the reason why they're asking feedback from us is we pretty much want a game development kit. So do they apparently..!

 

Yeah there's pretty much no downsides to Unity making games in their own engine, and selling those. It is extra revenue and a stronger product both perceptually and through hands on deep development.

Everyone wins. Except for this to happen, Unity would need to form or buy a really good AAA dev shop. Perhaps it's a future plan, I'm sure they've considered these angles.

 

I love Unity I honestly do, to get something whipped up quickly on par with a quick mobile demo it's delightful. A lot of it's systems are intuitive and easy to use like the UI, Umbra, Mecanim.. Scripting is brain dead easy, it's so quick you can make a change, test it and see what happens nearly instantly and you can extend with your own little tools pretty easily.. So that's it's intended purpose for me, a demo factory..

But that's where it ends for me, for commercial games of any substantial size eveything about it screams "I wasn't made for this".. When I say Unreal or CryEngine's easier to use, it's always for my intended purposes. Which I suppose is a niche really.

When you start fighting a closed engine, you're going to loose eventually..

 

I think Unity is very good to quickly get things started. It is a rapid dev tool for the majority of mobile games for sure. I think that is one of its biggest strengths probably. And for just getting people, particularly artists, into game dev.

Like I said previously here, I do think Unity is a great game engine. It really is. I'm just looking for something that better matches how I want to work.

While digging around this morning to see what is out there I came across something that looks pretty good. Now you are a much better judge of 3D graphics stuff than I am but I think the NeoAxis 3D Engine 3 looks well... it looks awesome to me in the Mountain Village Demo. As good as the best of any I have seen in other engines. Not sure if you will agree with that. But anyway have you checked that out?

Seems saturated and a bit "soft" but I am guessing that is just the settings they used in the demo.

Although I wasn't looking for something along these lines I am thinking of checking it out because at first glance it seems like a streamlined version of Unity.

 

You know speaking of alternative engines, I finally found one for @Arowx that is double precision.

https://unigine.com/en/products/engine
https://unigine.com/products/engine/unbounded-world

 

"Custom splash screen' -> "Contact sales".
Perhaps unity technologies should adopt that practice?

 

Yep! I came across that one this morning too and immediately though of @Arowx as well. LOL!

The thing is there are a lot of options out there. Sometimes I just wonder if people realize just how many there are. And more are being made all of the time.

 

Just wish Unity got it together and added: http://threejs.org/examples/webgl_camera_logarithmicdepthbuffer.html
Since even in Rust, the draw distance fighting truly sucks, and it doesn't need to. This technique is still valid without 64 bit engine support.

I think I can probably do it in shaders but I wonder why it's not supported by default as a toggle?

 

Unity should also consider to bring visual scripting.

 

You mean pull an NGUI on the Playmaker guys?

 

I have the two products and Uscript is lot better , Playmaker is not intuitive and lack node types.

 

I seriously don't have any complain about Unity, beside Enlighten being a homerun swing directly to someones own balls and the lack of proper support for advanced cinematics tools. We have about 20 mins of cut-scenes in Forgotten Memories, we struggled and hit the wall numerous times because Unity does not provide such tool, fortunately I got my hand on a free open source cut-scene tool that I customized to our needs and we where able to setup cut-scenes in Unity. But still, the workflow was archaic. We were short on memory as our first launch was iOS and the cut-scenes assets where taking millions times to load on the main thread + the memory required was too high. We endup pre-recording cut-scenes outside Unity and played as videos. First option was to play them as video textures but again, memory requirement was high as Unity does not stream such thing when played as texture. Pre-loading was also a nono, too long to load on memory. Then we hit another wall with multi-language subtitles as sub-titles where encoded directly on the video so we had to encode multiple versions of the same video and the third wall was the application size it jumped from 1.5GB to 2 something GBs.
In CryEngine you can stream such assets in a Cut-scene, fit them very nicely in a timeline editor and save the whole thin separately without polluting your scene. Localization is also handled globally very nicely. Yup, only one tiny feature made us tons of headaches...
I won't start on the Enlighten bashing cause everyone here knows about them. Neither on the large open world related thingies, it would derail a lot the thread.

 

It's planned dude, it's planned. Eventually. I guess Playables api is the start.

 

Because there's more to it than just a toggle:

 

Thing is there's a million things needed before that, c'mon the C# scripting system in Unity is probably THE easiest thing I've ever come across. It gets more confusing with VS due to all the squiggly lines..

 

Yeah I even adopted using coroutines, despite some mild allocs because I want to keep hair. Unity and C# makes it possible for a small developer to keep on top of things. C++ like it or not, is vastly more effort (but not that much harder - just more effort to do everything).

Even 10% more effort required can break a solo dev over the course of a few years. It all matters.

 

It can be easily encoded and decoded through replacement shaders and command buffers, but you need to create your own renderer in Unity and forget about any shader that uses standard depth encoding/decoding. It's possible, that's what we are doing on Forgotten Memories, though not the logarithmic depth buffer as we don't need large scale view, we rather need high precision in short distances (close to the camera) and this is where the logarithmic depth buffer falls short.

 

@hippocoder 5.5 Roadmap reverse-float depth buffer? Obviously there is still the 32bit limit.

Anyways after a quick run through, there is definitely some rough edges. So a quick and dirty summary of my experience so far.

The Good:
It's still a beautiful base.
The water
The Asset Pipeline with its reload capabilities.
Canvas for one off networking events

The bad:
The download(Needs a launcher badly)
At least to me the UX isn't terribly friendly compared to Unity(Especially if I need to onboard someone who has little-to-none game engine experience).
Gamelift - Really needs better documentation such as scaling conditions, simplier multi-region support, also needs Unix support( a t2.medium for instance is .052 per hour compared to .072), long term reservations.

 

Had a play with Lumberyard today, mostly because I was curious whether all of the 3.8.x CryEngine Volumetric Fog stuff made it into Lumberyard.

I'm not knowledgeable enough with Cryengine to be totally sure, but it looked to me like some of it made it in, but options such as noise-related ones are missing. It might even be a much older pre 3.8 version of the volumetric fog, I couldn't tell, I just know that some of my favourite options aren't there.

In any case, it certainly wasn't a system that Amazon & Lumberjack were drawing attention to - e.g. not in their docs, and the fog volume entity only seemed to be present in the 'legacy' gameSDK sample. Samples like Beach City seems to be using far more of the 'fake it' approach to fog, lighting etc.

 

Blueprints aren't a visual scripting tool anymore, Epic pushed it well past that.. Besides bugs with the core engine, there is pretty much nothing you can't do faster in BP's plus they have made serious effort to make them as lightweight as possible.

People seem to have something against them though, but think of it this way. How long does it take you to make a camera for an RPG game / character controller? There is no possible way on earth you can do it as quick as you can in BP's, you can do it in like ten BP's which takes a whole minute if you know what to do.

 

Based on the clean & lean GUI I am guessing this is also from NeoAxis 3D Engine 3?

I mean look at how clean, lean & mean that interface is. Just straight to the point.

Not really interested in blueprint visual scripting stuff (tried it a few weeks or so back) but still I like the highly focused clean GUI. Almost seems like a separate dedicated utility.

I guess I will check it out. If it is a no go I will keep searching. I am positive what I am looking for exists out there simply because there are so many people building these things from universities to lone wolf devs to dedicated companies.

The crazy thing is some of these things developed by just a few people seem as full featured as the big ones. Which has me thinking occasionally if just one man (or half a dozen folks) can build such things then why does it take these huge companies with large teams so long?

But yeah anyway I didn't mean to take things off topic. Sorry about that.

I hope Lumberyard does well. And Unity as well. I think each dev kit will have users who defend it to the end. And that is fine because well... it is the way it should be. Use what works best for you!

 

But it doesn't have a dark skin!

 

For a start: implement templated insertion sort with blueprints. Or binary search. Or any algorithm.

They royally suck as a general purpose language. That's why people don't like them.

 

Still, you can have half a prototype built by the time you've finished pratting around with the basics. Sooner or later they will become defacto standard, personally I prefer scripting languages.. I'm perfectly fluent in C++ but still avoid it when I can.

Full games have already been made in BP.

 

You wouldn't implement the functionality in Blueprints though. You'd build a custom node in C++ and use that. You could build a library of nodes over time and slowly progress towards the goal of largely, if not entirely, avoiding C++.

 

Visual Scripting will never replace real coding. Unless we are talking about simple high level behaviors or events. Though using a combination of both in low level and high level cases can be very powerful and is the recommended way.

 

Umm, well nobody knows that for a fact. But I think the hybrid approach will become the most popular way of doing things..

 

Why the heck would I waste my time doing that I just can implement the whole thing in C++?

Well, it goes like this. So far nobody created proper visual programming solution. No reason to think that unreal will be any different.

Also, tools of this kind always give me impression that whoever creates them treates users as toddlers. Instead of giving more powerful tools, they want to give everybody a set of crayons and coloring book. I honestly think it is a dead end in software development.

The main problem is that those kind of things do not give compact overview of the problem and waste a lot of screen space. They also do not cater to professional users. They always feel like a gimmick.

Frankly, one thing I didn't like about Unreal engine is technical skill level of the community. It is abysmal. And a lot of people are completely incompetent. I suspect that blueprints might have something to do with that.

 

It's much faster to use Blueprint.

 

Still BP's come as far as you'll get, why do they feel like a gimmick? I've created all sorts of systems from weather / TOD / Char controllers / inventory systems / wep systems etc. in them.. Anything else I wanted I just ported it back in from C++.

Again, I can do all that far faster than you or me faffing around with C++..

The skill level of the community? Well you could say that about any modern engine community, it's not like it was over a decade ago when all these fancy easy to use engines were'nt available. Where you'd download an IDE and crack on with GL..

Frankly because there is no need to be that technically proficient unless you're aiming for cutting edge sectors or plan to build your own framework / engine.. Even AAA use Unity for mobile and prototyping, because of it's ease of use.

 

UE4 let you do what you want : fully C++, fully BP or a mix
, so all users are happy.

The hybrid approach was used by Crysis long time ago, and Viusal Scripting got adopted by other AAA engines, art teams can make gameplay or dynamic visuals or interactions without having any programming knowledge.
watch 1:00

 

I'm talking generically, AAA engines have been doing this a long before CryTek got involved..

 

Because my experience using them is best described as "infuriating".
I would see a benefit if I were able to build a complex graph in 3 seconds using keyboard alone. Wherever I try to make something I do not feel any speedup or a boost compared to programming and instead have a VERY strong impression that I'm wasting a lot of time.

Whoever designed the system was mostly interested in building flowcharts with mouse, and not in efficiency. Workflow is way too slow, exchanging data through forums is slow, keeping big graph in scope is complex, default window only shows overly small portion of the problem. What's the point?

I think that unreal 4 would benefit more from a language with lisp-like syntax and fast identifier lookup. That would be pretty much the same thing, except without noodle dragging.

 

There are lots of positives, but there are some downsides. Some will worry that Unity are losing their focus, while others will worry about using a game engine whose provider also competes against them, and others will worry about not being heard because Unity have enough feedback from in-house developers.

If they did do it, a good thing would be to put the Unity projects on the Asset Store a year after release.

 

If you cant get your game to work in the 3 engines you mentioned, you are doing something wrong. Quit trying to blame it on the engines.

 

Yes, because engines are completely blameless and you will never encounter major problems...

 

Different experiences for different people I guess, for me it was great using the flow tester when you tested out your game. Instantly being able to find out where the issue is, I do admit it's a little "all over the place" adding in enum's into different class distinctions swapping back and forth, then having a level based BP doing something else.

But I don't really think that's a BP issue, it's an Unreal issue. Everything is all over the place, you'll be searching for options then remember you forgot to select advanced preview. Or there's a system connected to another system that you have to overide from a different system and it becomes a PITA!.. When you could just script something...

It's not like I don't get your point, it's just some tasks were so quick I kind of liked them. Personally when they create a component based LUA system in Lumberyard, I'll just be using that FG can kiss my rear..

 

Unless you know what I'm talking about keep it zipped.. It's been working fine in Unreal.! Just bashing away at artwork.

Still doesn't mean Unreal isn't "faffy"..

 

So how did thousands of other companies create games on these engines?

 

Doesn't mean there can't be showstopper issues for what you want to make.

 

How much of those thousands are genuinely big games?

 

you are missing Unreal and Unity. Nice fail though.

 

Unreal has a genuinely large list but each major release was practically a complete rewrite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

Unity is harder to calculate because the vast majority are not big titles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_games

By the way if you actually spend some time on these forums you'll find showstoppers are affecting other developers. The same is true across the other engines too.

 

Lineage 2 uses Unreal, Star Citizen uses Crysis. These engines are capable as F***. Again, quit trying to blame your incompetency on the engines.

 

Unreal 2.5 is completely different from Unreal 4. If you want an example of how much changes with every major engine release you should be able to still acquire UDK (aka Unreal 3) somewhere on Epic's website. It's night and day.