Engines have been big news for MMO players in recent months as indie sandbox The Repopulation’s struggles with Hero Engine drove it offline and eventually into the waiting arms of Unreal.
Enter Amazon, which today announced that it’s publishing a new pro game engine and dev environment under its AWS banner: Lumberyard.
“Lumberyard: A game engine and development environment designed for professional developers. A blend of new and proven technologies from CryEngine, Double Helix, and AWS, Lumberyard simplifies and streamlines game development. As a game engine, it supports development of cloud-connected and standalone 3D games, with support for asset management, character creation, AI, physics, audio, and more. On the development side, the Lumberyard IDE allows you to design indoor and outdoor environments, starting from a blank canvas.”
Of note to online gamers in particular, the megacorp has simultaneously revealed Amazon GameLift, intended to help devs “deploy and scale session-based multiplayer game servers for the games that [they] build using Lumberyard.” Lumberyard itself is a free engine, but the GameLift service includes on-demand fees.
