Amazon Lumberyard Releases Free Starter Game to Show Off Platform

If you're curious about Amazon Lumberyard, the free, cross-platform game engine based on the revolutionary CryEngine we talked about last year, now might be a good time to check it out, because it comes with a starter game:

Starter Game is the first complete game sample to showcase the latest capabilities of Lumberyard, Amazon’s free AAA game engine. Think of it as a “what’s what” of engine features: component entities, real-time global illumination, 3rd person camera and locomotion, interiors and exteriors, particle effects—all of these come to life in Starter Game in a big way. It’s not just a quick path for getting started with the engine; it’s also a great example of what you can build today using Lumberyard.

The game was developed by the folks who also developed Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and the Assassin’s Creed Chronicles, and as you can see from just this one screenshot, the graphics are pretty impressive -- as is the world it can simulate:

The world of Starter Game also takes advantage of Lumberyard’s voxel-based global illumination system, time of day editor, and sun trajectory tool. Lit by the sun’s angle at a particular time of the day, Starter Game shows off realistic effects like sun rays, long shadows, and volumetric fog across four square kilometers of terrain. Especially relevant for outdoor environments, the global illumination system is a great way to dramatically tweak the look and feel of your environment with just one single variable. We encourage you to play around with the game time to see how it affects the visual appearance of the world.

Hope Linden Lab, which is currently hiring someone to build editable, voxel-based terrain for Sansar, is taking notes!

Comments

[Dartagan Shepherd]

This is what a growing-up game engine looks like. Looking at you, Sansar.

[Wolkenreiter]

"[...] developed by the folks who also developed Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and the Assassin’s Creed Chronicles [...] ". Artists, not engines make graphics...
Also, how do the avatars in awes0mesauce Lumberjack look? ...and I'm sure they're providing out-of-the-box components to set a multi-user environments where people can meet and interact?
LL has to solve *completely* different challenges with Sansar, and comparing them by screenshots means exactly... nothing...

[Dartagan Shepherd]

@Wolkenreiter What other challenges?

[Wolkenreiter]

@Dartagan:
-Figuring out a way to enable people to build complex scenes and experiences from a variety of 3rd party assets, while still retaining VR-grade performance, with no central authority (art director). In a game production, not every artist can freely use their own set of unique high resolution textures.
-Versatile, stable multi-user functionality that enables people to meet and interact within the experiences.
None of the commercial game engines available come with out of the box networking modules that would suffice to built a virtual world without considerable engineering efforts.
-a standard avatar system, that allows end users a large amount of customization while giving content creators a reliable base to work with.
If I want to make and sell animations for human(oid) avatars, I need at least a rig that ensures they will work with any such avatar.
-Asset streaming.
Yes, Unity and other engines do provide means for dynamically fetching content packages from a server, but not to the degree a virtual world, that is in steady change and transition would require.
-all the boring, technical low-level stuff like shaders.
Sansar users won't write their own shaders. Even if they could, they will likely not bring the funds to pay for the QA required to test them across the wide range of hardware out there.
-Testing and debugging.
at least half, if not more of the efforts spent on a game production are testing. Game developers hire dedicated QA studios for that, but that is, obviously, cost-prohibitive for the small scale experiences Sansar is geared towards.
For games,

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Actually many indie games do use lots of third party assets. None of them, including for Sansar will be optimized for VR. In game production you cannot use any asset you feel like and call it optimized. This is true anywhere.

And game engines do include networking. Unity needs a bit more custom push for networking while Unreal Engine does have out of the box networking for network, single player, multi-player self hosted or multi-player dedicated server configurations.

There are also standardized skeletons in use for Unity and Unreal Engine as well as compatible rigs for other engines.

Actually the engines don't provide much support for dynamically loading assets. Neither will Sansar most likely, Sansar maps will need baking like any other game engine.

Game engines also have built in shaders, and you have the ability to create your own. Sansar probably will be limited in this regard, true.

I don't know where you're getting that with testing. In game engines both the company providing the engine provide testing and quality control, and teams of game developers have extensive debugging tools to test with.

Some engines such as Unreal Engine and Lumberyard also provide source code, so that game developers can jump in and contribute to any bugs as well as the company. Sansar is not going to provide their source code.

If anything Sansar will only have a fraction of the capability of any game engine, including its VR support.

Sansar is boasting some voxel support and PBR, which of course is something any new game engine is likely to explore. Then again, voxels and PBR aren't the features that make or break successful games and ventures.