ASK & DISCUSS
INDEXLumberyard (this is more interesting than it sounds)
9 years, 8 months ago - Marlom Tander
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/10/amazon_launches_lumberyard_beta_free_cloud_gaming_engine/
Technically, this is way out my my league, (I last coded a game when I was 15 and punk was still a new thing), but I've often wondered whether a high end game engine could be used to create an animated movie and/or VR.
If anyone has the technical chops to master it, and the answer is that the output would be of the required quality, I'd be interested in exploring ideas wearing my writerly hat.
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9 years, 8 months ago - Alève Mine
What do you think about their overtly extreme proprietary approach?
First I thought of asking some members of my VR group or a few 3D artists I've recently met, but that question kept me.
9 years, 8 months ago - Marlom Tander
Amazon have built it, it seems to be technically top notch. If it delivers the goods, I don't mind Amazon then saying that IF you build something you can sell, then you need to use our platform to sell it.
While there are open source game design platforms, are they as technically capable? IMO for what I'm interested in - which is a VR or story driven product - a low res solution is fine for Angry Birds but not for this.
Open Source is great - I have a Linux PC and use Open Office etc, but if the job takes a proprietary tool, so long as the overall deal works, who cares?
In this case you can build for free and roll out for marginal costs. Do you really want to build for free on OS and then think "shit, now we need 100K to build and manage the initial Private Cloud, but we don't know if anyone will pay for the product yet".
With Lumberyard your roll out costs come after your sales revenue, which is the kind of cash flow model that appeals to me :-)
9 years, 8 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin
Indeed, Amazon's AWS cloud service (a surprise hit from selling spare/excess server capacity!) is competitively priced and is PAYG. I don't think it's the end of the world that they should recoup some costs on the (moderately priced) back end :)
9 years, 8 months ago - Alève Mine
ok Marlom, see PM
9 years, 8 months ago - Alève Mine
er no see email
9 years, 8 months ago - AndBut Films
How does this compare with Unreal engine and Unity3D?
9 years, 8 months ago - Alève Mine
When you find that out, please let us know. I've only seen Unity at work.
9 years, 8 months ago - Marlom Tander
http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/09/amazon-takes-on-unity-et-al-with-lumberyard-a-free-cross-platform-game-engine/
http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/116362/how-does-lumberyard-stack-up-against-unity-5-and-ue4 (which seems to have caused a closed to comments reaction, which suggests to me that Unity peeps see it as a threat).
http://community.crowfall.com/index.php?/topic/10872-lumberyard-vs-unity/ implies that adoption will require work by interested programmr devs
and what looks like a proper grown up discussion between people who know what they're talking about:-
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/lumberyard-amazons-cryengine-based-engine-with-free-source-code.384941/
and to my laymans eye, can be summed up as "intrigued, taking it seriously, but not yet had time to fully assess", which is fair enough, it's hardly been long.
I also think that they liked the engine but that it had annoying niggles, and one thing Amazon do like to iron out is annoying niggles.
9 years, 8 months ago - Rudolf Kremers
Game engine based films have been made for decades. It's a style of film making called "Machinima" and can yield some interesting results. The good news is that there is a large dedicated community out there so if you want to dip your toes into this you can just reach out on dedicated forums.
Here is an introduction:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-free-tools-creating-machinima-films/
One word of warning, if you are not a gamer you may encounter some hostility/sarcasm, but if you research properly and respect the medium people should be happy to help you.
R