Back in February, Amazon announced that they had purchased and forked Crytek’s CryEngine and made the full source code available in a free AAA VRgame engine offering called Lumberyard. The only catch is that if you want to use any public cloud service, then you have to use Amazon Web Service offerings.
At SIGGRAPH, I had a chance to talk with Hao Chen, a senior principal engineer for Amazon Lumberyard, about the Cloud Canvas visual scripting interface to AWS and GameLift multiplayer offerings. We also talked about some of the research and development areas such as integrated artificial intelligence offerings, natural language processing with Alexa, potential ecommerce solutions, and research into digital lightfield capture, compression, and delivery.
Amazon wasn’t making any specific new product or gaming content announcements, but it’s clear that part of Amazon’s long-term strategy is to rely upon game developers using their public cloud services in order to fund and sustain future development on their Lumberyard game engine. You can hear more about some of the existing features and functionality of Lumberyard as well as some future research on today’s episode of the Voices of VR podcast.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
