Yeah, here’s hoping somebody updates Cryblend to work with this. Last I heard Cryblend was kind of broken in regards to animation exporting, but I could be wrong.
If you’re interested in CryEngine this seems good. Personally I’m not a fan of being tied to AWS for cloud services… I feel like that’s an easy way to build yourself into a corner - e.g., you make a great game that people like, but the AWS costs are too high for it to keep running. That could easily happen to a smaller dev. I prefer costs to be up front or at least easily understandable (Unity and UE4).
A separate issue is whether or not Amazon will be able to maintain Lumberyard to the standard of CryEngine or UE4/Unity for any real amount of time. While it may be competitive with modern engines now, it’s not a cut and dried thing to get an engine team that can keep pace with the top dogs.
LUA Scripting - People keep praising LUA but in my years I’ve only found it to be annoying.
Native WWISE integration - This one is neat. Didn’t Epic say they’re redoing most of their audio stuff though?
Built-in polygonal modelling via Cryengine Designer - This is a gimmick at best. Why would you want to use this next to a fully-featured modeling package?
Automatic mesh LOD generation - A neat thing to have, but merely just a convenience unless it works (properly) with animated skeletal meshes.
Working MSAA on a fully deferred renderer - This one’s neat.
Game-ready AI out of the box (with stealth!) - Pre-made stuff like this is good for prototyping, but in your real product you’ll really be making custom stuff.
Working (albeit slow) voxel-based global illumination - UE4 has VXGI.
The in-engine modeler looks like it can handle most tasks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqvhSPhY6EY
I agree with you. I too think that Amazon just might at the very least has the resources to try and tackle the huge undertaking of making CE better in the before mentioned regards. A little bit of healthy competition cannon be wrong, eh?
So far, I can only wish them the best of luck 
It’s an absolute industry standard.
Again, industry standard. If you’re at all serious about game audio, WWISE proficiency is a must.
For sure, it’s perhaps a niche feature considering current content authoring trends, but having that kind of thing there is fantastic for rapid level prototyping. We’ve all worked with UE4’s current geometry tools and likely wept in the process. By all accounts, CE3’s tools are far more flexible and stable than UE4’s.
Honestly not sure whether it does or not as I have very little experience with the engine, but it’s definitely a nice timesaver if it works.
I’m by no means saying these are killer features or necessary things to have, but for some people’s preferences and workflows, at least some of these things could potentially be really helpful.
Which runs better on medium class hardware ?
Yea but can Lumberyard do this?
Unreal Engine Can!! 
<link removed>
Right. The engine may be free but if I have to buy Maya or 3dMax to use it then Lumberyard has become expensive.
I’ve used ce in the past but hated it because of lack of documentation. Lumberyard is honestly not much different. I’ve been using lumberyard for a little while now. I was debating on to leave ue4 for lumberyard. Great engine, but I’m staying with ue4 though because of the community. Can’t beat it.
It looks decent
Got an email today announcing the Beta: Fully Customizable Game Engine - Amazon Lumberyard -Amazon Web Services
The engine looks cool and Amazon has the muscle to do far more with it than Crytek has.
We also have to remember that Amazon is basically jumping in head first into the game market including buying Double Helix. They seem to want to take this seriously so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that all the issues mentioned so far here will be addressed. You guys seems to forget what UE4 looked like when it first came out. I think when they start porting to the different major OS (OS X snd which they say is the works) we may see some major overhaul since CryEngine traditionally is a PC only engine.
I’m sure they will get some 2D stuff in there a well since mobile indie games make up a substantial portion of the dev market. It took a while for Unity and Unreal to integrate decent 2d support into their engines too.
I do agree that the pipeline right now is a little lacking. They really need to fix that. Especially when they move to OS X since you have a lot of users who use Modo or Cinema4D there. IMO the best at this is still Unity. Unreal doesn’t do too bad though.
Either way it’s a start and Amazon is seeing an opportunity that frankly I don’t see anyone else addressing which is easy cloud based gaming services for developers that can scale. They also seem to be offering these services from multiple angles, so streaming, online play, cacheing, building, getting performance metrics from your game via the cloud. Quite extensive imo. It would be great if Amazon would give other engines some kind of SDK or something. I’m sure they will at some point, that’s basically leaving money on the table, imo. If Amazon wants to sell services they are going to have to offer their services to more than just people who use their engine no matter how much they paid for that engine.
I like UE4 tho and I’m still learning it. Either way it’s a great time to be a game developer. There really are no excuses at this point
ah man really, the Cryengine still has that atrocious asset pipeline even after all these years? Horrible 3ds max plugin that seemed completely random whether it brought the textures through properly or not, just depended how it felt at that particular moment the mardy git. It also does kind of encourage piracy of 3ds max/maya if that’s the only way to get assets into the game engine. In all honesty what is the point of using a game engine that’s free to use when you need to pay thousands for a 3ds max licence just so you can import your models.
Saying that Sketchup used to work with it but I never tried it.
Well good luck to them I suppose, I liked using the level editor in Cryengine so if they could make the engine more user friendly all round it might be worth using.
Being able to use the Cryengine without having to deal with Crytek or come into contact with Cry-Adam (******) can only be a good thing.
To be fair, even UE3 has better authoring tools than CryEngine.
Lack of documentation/online material is a massive deal breaker. I’m always blown away by how much learning content is available for UE4.
having used cry-engine for a long time i honestly do not see why everyone always complains about the max - cry pipeline.
It had benefits. Functionality that UE4 does not offer nor plans to offer.
Mesh checking, quick export import pipeline. Vertex setups, transfer of sockets eliminating the need to do it after the fact in the engine. Basically the pipeline allowed you to do almost everything in max.
Hell… even their documentation we superb for the asset pipeline. My favorite being how to create bending vegetation on the asset itself.
That’s probably still my biggest issue with UE4. No support for vegetation bending. Has to be done via materials. Which most of the time is some ******** wavey effects.True story bro
Hi
I would like to share my experience regarding engine choice since some are hyping Lumberyard now, as they did a year back as unreal engine became free.
Before I switched to UE4 I have used unity3d to create my game, but with unity5 and their inability to get physx cars to work I made the decision to move to UE4 for the following reasons and didn’t regret it:
1.) complete source access, so I can look around in the engine code to find out how things work and with my years of programming experience in several languages this feels like second nature now.
2.) independence, with Unity I had to rely on their developers to fix crucial bugs, something that became obvious to me in the past year with they attitude regarding their vehicle implementation, their engine as completely useless for me and I had already payed the license, wasted money!! (did they fix it already?)
3.) incomplete feature sets, I just have to mention the terrain system and all the asset store plugins you need to get where unreal engine is out of the box.
Think about point 2.), with Lumberyard you are tied to AWS and twitch, obviously Amazon wants to earn money with AWS and twitch, so what about the pricing of AWS? Will that change in the future? You probably can’t calculate these costs upfront!
About 3.) is the development guaranteed for atleast 3-4 years? UE4 has a huge community and very dedicated inhouse developers who push out releases on a regular basis, a lot of issues seem to be addressed quickly.
Another thing to take care of, the most important part of your game is your customer database, where will it be stored?
Are you allowed to run your own database on a dedicated server, or do you have to use AWS services as well? If the later is the case, do you feel good about it?
You never know who has access to it as long you don’t host it yourself.
A lot of potential customers don’t like to share their data(even if its just their IP), with these large companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook ,…
Remember, the best engine is useless if you don’t have the resources/skill to create/buy decent looking assets.
And the last and most important point: The Community!! UE4 has a great developer community with a lot of experience developers who as willing to help you!
It took me quite some time to get the hang of UE4, but I really like it now as it offers almost everything I need to finish the project.
I will definitely stick with UE4!
haha you made my day.
Well I spent a few hours fighting with Lumberyard lastnight. After DL 15GB and then some 3rd party software it does not deploy very well. In fact I have had it crash on every attempt and multiple different scenerios from loading test levels to creating new ones. They have made launching the engine extremely convoluted and they need to streamline it. There will be nothing even close to Epics launcher…I think we are extremely spoiled.