Amazon has released two GDC 2017 videos, showing what game developers can achieve with its Lumberyard Engine. Amazon Lumberyard is described as a free AAA game engine deeply integrated with the AWS Cloud and Twitch, empowering game developers to bring their most ambitious creations to life.
The first video shows the Lost tech demo, featuring a variety of techniques running in real-time, including physically-based rendering, photogrammetry, and world-class performance modularity.
The second video features the Bistro tech demo, showcasing a range of cutting-edge rendering techniques running in real-time, including Specular Anti-aliasing, Temporal Anti-aliasing, and Order Independent Transparency.
We’ve also included a third video dedicated to Amazon’s Engine, in which developers talk a bit about it.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Looks impressive, but it’s all about how the engine “feels” and handles movement
That part is always modifiable. Tweaks to motion and physics etc are often wide open to the developers, and I’m sure this is no different.
most devs are to lazy to touch that though, look at UE and its terrible, floaty movement in 99% of UE games.
wow i hate the way that fur looks, i dont know why it seems so fake to me
Lol they keep showcasing features that literally haven’t been changed whatsoever since Crytek made them. I don’t even know what rendering features lumberyard added on top of Cryengine.
I don’t think any. All they added was AWS Cloud, Livestreaming and Twitch Chat support.
The short version being, aside from integrating Amazon-owned services directly into the engine, most of the changes have been internal, resulting in actually good support & documentation, compared to Crytek’s legendary non-existent degrees of support for licensees. These decisions should, in fact, pay off for them quite well in the long-term, especially considering Crytek’s standing “f*ck off & die” policy towards licensees.
The long version being, see above.
crytek is very week because of failures on console( Rise sons of rome)so they maybe want some juicy money.
In theory, sure.
In practice? Their last productions, much like Ryse before it, were more console-exclusives, & not just any old type of console-exclusive, but, more specifically, they’re PSVR-exclusives, for f*ck’s sake, meaning, if they’re lucky, they’ll break even on their costs. Other than that, they’ve got two other projects currently in development; a F2P that’s basically akin to a joke (much like most everything they’ve done in the last 10 years), & another game that’s either currently stuck in limbo, been passed off to a different studio, or cancelled, completely, though we’ve no word either way.
If Crytek is ever going to turn around, it’ll be before the end of this year. If not, then they’ll probably go down & die, soon, chasing the same absurd business model that’s had them bleeding f*cktonnes of money for how many years now. This November marks Crysis’ 10th anniversary; if they do something to commemorate the event (read: the remaster people have been demanding for years, for example), then it’ll indicate that they’ve actually, successfully (FINALLY) pulled their heads out of their collective asscracks. If not, hasta la vista, Crytek.
Or, well, that’s what I figure, anyway.
They added something called copyright lol
More than anything they cleaned out all the bullsh*t Crytek was leaving behind every time they were changing something, causing the internal coding of CryEngine to become an ever-more confusing mess, riddled with legacy sh*t that barely needed to exist anymore, which bogged down the entire thing.
Sadly, they did it all on a version of 3.5.8, so they don’t have the latest in lighting & rendering that Crytek implemented either, so it is a trade-off; clear-cut documentation, far better netcode, a generally easier to use engine (with mandatory AWS integration for the online portions, to be fair), vs. a more advanced engine that demands either a sh*tload of patience, or a lot of prior experience.
Basically, see Star Citizen’s delay issues courtesy of nobody knowing what the f*ck they were doing with CryEngine until they got all those former Crytek employees on board as well.
Regardless, CryEngine 3.5, unlike Unreal 3, was already mostly “next-gen” ready, so it’s not like Crytek actually needed to do major revamps to the engine, unlike Epic Games, but yeah, the fact that all they’ve done for the last 10 years is build on the same basic CryEngine code base without even documenting their own sh*t properly has really dragged CryEngine down in the last years, & even CE5 isn’t much better off in that regard, to be fair.
unreal engine is the best free engine till now
Not particularly impressing, to be honest.
Man, are Amazon really gonna start making Lumberyard their own and take all credit for it and earn alotta money of it?? This should of happened with Cryengine and Crytek is the ones needing all the credit and money for it.
Heck, even cryteks own stuff looks better than what’s shown in these two videos. And frankly, only the first one was impressive, the second demo of Paris wasn’t anything special, even UE4 Samatarian or whats its name looks better…
Generally speaking CryENGINE (lumberyard etc) should look better in vegetated environments since that’s where Cryengine shines. I’ve yet to seen any other engine outdo Cryengine in forest, jungle etc type of environments.
What is the issue? Crytek sold them the license to do whatever they want with it.
Imagine this: Unreal Engine was not popular, and not many games used it. Then I got to Epic and license it and renames it and starts to earn sh*tloads of money on it, and everyone will give me the credit for it.
It’s just wrong in my eyes.
It’s wrong if they have no permission to do it, which they clearly do in this case.
If Epic Games were choking themselves to death due to horrible mismanagement, would you want their glorious game engine to go under with them, or would you rather it survived them, even if, in an altered (read: improved) state?
Crytek is a dying company, with not much time left before they finally go under unless they shape up, & it’ll be sad, & tragic, & all that other sh*t, but if nothing else, at least CryEngine will survive them, outside the hands of some mega-publisher like EA or Square Enix which will probably buy it up at their bankruptcy auction & wall it up for internal usage only from that point forward.
Lumberyard is free so how are amazon making money from it?
Every time I see any sort of tech demo trying to show off some technology or assets, I always end up ignoring them since the tech won’t get there thanks to consoles. That and it’s rare to see high level tech being used on a PC than being wasted on a console.
Er, this is the engine to be used by Star Citizen.
Correction; this engine’s netcode is being used by Star Citizen. The rest of the Star Engine is a mixture of new coding (%50, as of late December 2016), & Crytek coding completely untouched by the Amazon Lumberyard modifications, even though both the Star Engine & the Lumberyard engine are branches of CryEngine 3.8.
There was an accidental misrepresentation of the actual events at some point back when this was initially reported, which only got worse what with so many news publication sites just quoting each other on the “facts.” Star Engine is still Star Engine, which is a completely separate engine from Lumberyard, though they share quite a lot of similarities, & now, even the same netcode basis.
Thanks for clarifying the matter. Yes, sites certainly did misrepresent the facts.
My bad, this guy was right; they dropped the CryEngine portions of Star Engine & replaced them with Lumberyard’s respective versions, instead, so now Star Engine is a mixture of CIG coding, & Amazon Lumberyard coding, rather than CIG & Crytek CryEngine coding.
Turns out I was misquoting the original article for two months, now. Oops >.<
Other than that, yeah, Star Engine is still a separate thing from Lumberyard, even though Star Engine has considerable Lumberyard-sourced portions, which are, in turn, originally CryEngine-sourced, from the same version as Star Engine was originally being sourced from.
If that makes any sense.
This tech is already here and being used. Remember lumberyard is just CryEngine and CryEngine has been out for ages now.
Plus you forgot about Star Citizen
Phenomenal lies. Because of majority of configurations its hard to use super tech on pc. On console only games you can do miracles. See at Uncharted 4 and Horyzon.On pc you dont have such fantastic tech now.
And yet we’re seeing Star Citizen. With high end configs, yes, yes you can.
and?
I can’t see the videos since we have Youtube blocked at work, but that guy with the Lumberyard t-shirt in the third video looks amazingly realistic!.
Isn’t this Engine based on CRYENGINE 3?
CryEngine 3.8 to be specific, but yeah.