Amazon's Lumberyard Game Engine

Amid the chatter from the 2017 GDC (Game Developers Conference) last week, someone mentioned Amazon's Lumberyard game engine. I hadn't seen or heard anything about Lumberyard since its debut a year ago so I headed over to the website for a look.

Lumberyard is a game engine created from a fork of CryTek's CryEngine. Amazon offers all aspects of the engine for free up to but not including their AWS hosting platform. It sounded interesting last year but they seemed a long way away from competing with Unity. Unity is also available for free with an annual income-cap restriction for commercial products.

Apparently Amazon demonstrated Lumberyard version 1.8 at their GDC booth and talked about improvements to the engine like PBR (physically based rendering). They also showed some impressive demo reels. While looking at these on YouTube I discovered some Lumberyard tutorial videos, too. One in particular caught my eye: how to use a built-in 3D modeling function, what they call the Designer Tool.

One video led to another and ninety minutes later I think I'd seen all fifteen tutorials. I'm impressed by what Lumberyard can do, particularly for educators and students, the caveat being I have not yet installed or tested the software. If it weren't for their Rift and Vive virtual reality headset support, I probably wouldn't have time. But with built-in 3D modeling tools, Lumberyard could be an alternative to Unity for educational VR simulations and visualizations.

T.M.Wilcox, April, 2017

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