Code named Amazon Lumberyard, it has come to stir the competition in gaming engine. This may come as a shocker to a many people as Amazon is widely known for as an online selling site to many of us. But amazon has recently been moving into unchartered territory. Of late it has been very successful in the cloud services industry, having created AWS cloud that has very appealing features. It appears that they have really been busy as they have recently launched a new game engine known as Lumberyard. This engine is apparently based on Crytek’s Famous Cry Engine. It can be used for many different purposes, one of them being the fact that it can be used to develop new games in the market. One of the coolest things about this new game engine is that it is really low on finances as it is absolutely free to download. On top of that, it does not carry other common fees such as a subscription fees with it.Sure, there may be fees that may be encountered especially when a game decides to use the amazon AWS engine’s other services, for example .Even though the engine is based on Crytek’s Cry Engine, the CEO claimed that this engine intends to fly on its own. The engine has got some new features.Apparently, not all its features and components are based on Cry Engine rather others are entirely new. The engine plans to stand on its very own. Let us quickly review this features.
Lumberyard – an open source
Lumberyard is open source. This is in two parts and from where I stand it is a plus and another even greater plus. This means that developers have the freedom to download the source code for Lumbard and pop the hood. And they can customize the engine to fit their desired outcome. This means more freedom as the engine extensibility has been made even easier than before. So if you feel that a feature has been left out you can add it, or if you feel that you want to know exactly what happens under the hood for any particular reason for instance you want to improve performance or it will make you feel better then Lumbard gives you the freedom to open it up.
Free to use
Lumberyard is free. Using the engine comes free of charge. That means the license to use the engine comes with zero cost. Here the only cost that may be incurred is if you choose to use the amazon cloud services. Meaning that you will not pay for the engine but other components of the AWS services. This may include storage space or even instances if you choose to go multiplayer and they need to access the server at the same time. CPU usage measured in the number of cores used or simply if you want a replica of the data for backup.
Lumberyard integration.
Lumberyard integrates with Amazon services seamlessly. That means it can create an instance and utilize the AWS services like database or the web servers like xampp and tomcat, or maybe you want to run this in a Linux environment, this will be as easy as adding a service tier. Again Lumbard has integrated with the gaming communication framework called twitch. This extends the features of Lumberyard from just a gaming platform to a fully-fledged solution that not only creates the game but the full package. Which is another advantage that will see the engine stand out from the competition. This is the latest tech news so you better be on the lookout.
Conclusion
It is hard to say how quickly it will get adopted but we can say that it will surely catch on to other engines. It stands out especially because of its integration and policy. The features will be another plus. This will include the ease at which you can integrate good graphics to the engine. But as a whole the user experience is good. And the buy products to showcase the product seem to be spot on. And just like other engines some features are drag and drop and creating a scene seem to be really easy. But the competitive edge as I had said earlier is the fact that it is free and open source. Again it comes not only as a gaming engine but as well as a solution that integrates various facets of the gaming development to bring them into one platform. Again Amazon is a giant that seems to know its stuff. And with its success in the cloud arena, having proven themselves and beaten competition from giants like google and Microsoft Azure Amazon seems to be talking business and ready to change the gaming landscape. But as we know Amazon have standards and being a new entrant in this market does not mean that Amazon is the new kid, otherwise it means that a new competitor has just checked in and we game engine creators must sleep with one eye open.
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