AWS - Release their own free to use AAA Game Engine

[Baaleos]

               

https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/

 

 

Apparently it is well suited to session based games, so perhaps redeveloping something like NWN in a more modern engine is not beyond the realms of possibility after all.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

According to the FAQ you can only create on-line multi-player games with it though.

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Frush O'Suggill]

               

I'm not sure about that, Tarot. The section of the FAQ concerning AWS does make mention of single player and local multplayer games. They also state that you can include elements of the development environment for use as a toolset in your games, which could be promising. I haven't downloaded it yet myself, but I'm curious to dig around in it. Thanks for the head-up, Baaleos.

               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               

According to the FAQ you can only create on-line multi-player games with it though.

 

TR

AWS have said that you can create single player and offline games, in fact you can use the engine for free, without having to host on AWS at all.

The only limitation is that you cannot host games on servers owned by other cloud providers. As that takes business away from AWS and gives it to other providers.

You can however host servers/games on servers you own, but are hosted in a datacenter.

(Ownership is the key)


Yeah, so it does single player and multiplayer/online.

               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               

Oh, the other caveat is that although you can release elements of the source code, the engine etc

You cannot however open source anything.


Basically means that anyone who takes possession of the engine, game created in the engine, agrees to not share the source code for the game engine on github or redistribute it in an open source license type.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tchos]

               

Any idea what the AWS services are, when they say "You only pay for the AWS services you choose to use"?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

I wonder if you could drive the server portion of it off a NWN server backend, acting like a mostly "dumb" relay and essentially turning Lumberyard into a NWN client replacement?

               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               

AWS Services include, but not limited to:

 

EC2 Servers (the virtual / dedicated servers you might want to run your game servers on)

SQS - Queue messaging services

Databases

API Endpoints 

And probably auto-scaling and other log / monitoring tools.

 

As for the client replacement - it sounds feasible.

Isn't someone already recreating the client? I could of sworn I saw a post where someone recreated the client, using a different graphics engine?


Not a full client replacement, but I would say that its definitely possible to have a nwn server communicate with a custom client, and the server not being able to tell the difference. Would take effort to finish it though.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_apunyfly]

               

Some of the game devs I follow on Twitter had a couple of things to say about AWS.

 

They seemed mostly dubious about it. Both about the source code aspect of things, and about whether it would still be maintained in five years.

 

Twitch integration seems like an original feature. Cloud integration, and most of the features they mention seems tailor-built for making free-to-play games though.

 

I dunno, Amazon is pretty new to the game engine market, I'd say wait and see more than anything else, it's in beta, it's at the stage where they can show bells and whistles but we've no idea how support will work in practice yet, how they will behave regarding the games made with their engine. They still have some issues to sort out (I read a post from a game dev stating that his games had been uploaded on their app service without permission, and Amazon had done nothing to remove them), before I'd trust them.

 

It does have a couple of well-known game devs with a very good resume working on it (like Patrick Wyatt, for instance), so they must have trusted Amazon to be doing things right.

 

Just speculating for now...

 

On a side note, clause 57.10 is weird. Viral apocalypse ?

               
               

               
            

[Baaleos]

               

Yeah, saw clause 57 myself.

Some lawyer must have been bored when he was writing it. Lol

Consider it an easter egg

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_apunyfly]

               

Or maybe they know something we don't... (shivers)

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_werelynx]

               

A pure coincidence perhaps.. they sell such umbrellas: