Amazon releasing their own game engine, free with source code access and planned support for Linux.

jeremy · 02-09-2016, 01:32 PM

Quote:

Q. What is Amazon Lumberyard?
Amazon Lumberyard is a free AAA game engine deeply integrated with AWS and Twitch – with full source code provided. Whether you are a major studio, an indie developer, a student, or a hobbyist, Lumberyard provides a growing set of tools to create the highest-quality games, connect your games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans on Twitch. Lumberyard helps developers build beautiful worlds, make realistic characters, and create stunning real-time effects. With Lumberyard’s visual scripting tool, even non-technical game developers can add cloud-connected features to a game in minutes (such as a community news feed, daily gifts, or server-side combat resolution) through a drag-and-drop GUI interface. Lumberyard is also integrated with Amazon GameLift, a new AWS service for deploying, operating, and scaling session-based multiplayer games. With Amazon GameLift, Amazon Lumberyard developers can quickly scale high-performance game servers up and down to meet player demand, without any additional engineering effort or upfront costs.

Amazon Lumberyard is free, and available in beta for developers building PC and console games, with mobile and virtual reality (VR) platforms coming soon. With Amazon Lumberyard, developers only pay standard AWS fees for the AWS services they choose to use. With Amazon GameLift, you simply pay for the standard AWS fees for Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and data transfer you actually use, plus a small fee per Daily Active User.

Q. Do I really get source code access to Lumberyard?
Yes. Access to full C++ source code is included with the download of Lumberyard.

Q. What device platforms does Lumberyard support?
Lumberyard currently supports PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. Mobile support for iOS and Android devices is coming soon, along with additional support for Mac and Linux. Note that Sony and Microsoft only permit developers who have passed their screening process to develop games for their platforms.

Q. Is Lumberyard “open source”?
No. We make the source code available to enable you to fully customize your game, but your rights are limited by the Lumberyard Service Terms. For example, you may not publicly release the Lumberyard engine source code, or use it to release your own game engine.

--jeremy

astrogeek · 02-09-2016, 01:52 PM

I would not walk the same side of the street with an amazon API, schema or code base...

All the cost, risk and responsibility will be to the developer, and all the benefit, plus interest will be to amazon alone.

And when you have put your sweat into making something worthwhile, and laid your future plans for your creation - amazon will unceremoniously snatch it from you without warning, recourse, compensation or acknowledgment, and please don't bleed on the wheels as they grind you underneath.

Personal experience.

Myk267 · 02-10-2016, 02:22 PM

Sounds like a good place to start your next MOBA.

I've worked on some closed source games (I made game mods in a past life), and after realizing that all of that work is dead in the sense that I can't really do anything with it (Thanks, copyright overlords!), I don't see myself falling into the same sort of trap with any of these game engine middleware things (Unity, Lumberyard, &c), especially not ones dependent on a specific server set (AWS, Twitch), so it's not for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multip...e_battle_arena