Amazon Lumberyard - 'Free AAA game engine'

[El_Exodus]

Just launched. It's based on the Cryengine.

More info and details here: http://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/

 

[TheOnlyDoubleF]

Looks a lot like UE4 with the Cry problems. 

[AtsEst]

it looks EXACTLY like Cryengine and I mean it actually freaking is Cryengine, but with full source...

Which you mentioned, but that is so weird to me.

Edited February 9, 2016 by AtsEst

[r1ar]

CRYENGINE tools, flow-graph... WTF?

[Corwin]

It's CryEngine, just a recent branching off of it. Good thing is that expertise with those tools may be about to become more widely useful than just the handful of companies using the CryEngine so far

[AlexM]

Holy shit they talk about Twitch a lot in that video. 

[blackdog]

Interesting!
And, is Twitch really that relevant? Can't see why you need to integrate that thing in a game. (I'm off all the watching people play thing)

[AlexM]

Yeah it's a little weird since my impression is that adding twitch support is not a hard thing to do. 

They also require that if you use the engine and use a cloud service you can only use AWS. I'd guess the rules for a streaming service require twitch as well. Not a huge deal but I don't really see much reason to use this engine since they haven't spent any time really talking about features developers actually care about. 

[Minos]

Really awesome that they are doing this but seems like a pretty big risk to embark on a long project with it imo. Amazon being a public company they can just plug this offline anytime if adoption is low, specially if their game division is not making enough money. I still haven't seen anything good come out of their studios and only hear bad things about the place. :/

Why didn't they just buy crytek straight away? Feels weird to have two simultaneous branches of the same engine going on...

[FMPONE]

Amazon being a public company they can just plug this offline anytime if adoption is low, specially if their game division is not making enough money. 

[blackdog]

Well but when you have that engine for free, can't you mess with the code as much as you want? If they shut down wouldn't you be allowed to do whatever you want with it?

[Minos]

That's a good point. if you have a large team with enough budget, time and expertise it shouldn't matter much... I was talking more about small indie teams that would be left with unsupported should that happen

I'm not saying don't use this, just be aware of the risk. Choosing an engine is like getting engaged, chose your wife wisely 

But now I'm wondering something. Let's say, some studio chooses to develop their own proprietary engine and instead of starting from scratch can they take this as a base and heavily modify it, or is there anything in the EULA preventing that from happening?

[AlexM]

It's open source but not an open license. There's probably a ton of stuff preventing you from using the engine in ways that conflict with the contract.

[blackdog]

At least this is the cheapest way to get expertise with an updated version of the CryEngine, if one is looking to getting a job in a company that has adopted it.

[FrieChamp]

I'm curious if Crytek is going make any additions to Cryengine in the future that would give them an edge and warrant using their license instead of going with Lumberjack. At this point it looks like they effectively sold their engine business to Amazon.