Open 3D Engine for games

While I certainly support the idea of having an unencumbered commercial-quality 3D engine, I'm a bit skeptical. Coincidentally yesterday I just read an article about Amazon's game division on Bloomberg which seems to indicate that Lumberyard is lacking massively compared to its competitors. There's a video about this article on YT as well, it's where I got the reference myself.
Lumberyard is/was also open-source AND royalty-free and yet there are no indie games using it. Not having a single finished game out there while the engine is 5 years old isn't exactly a massive endorsement.

The cynic in me would say that Amazon is just off-loading its responsibilities on other companies. Also, where's the money going to come from? Are these companies going to keep paying for development without a return on investment? Is the Linux foundation up to the task? A 3D engine is a really specific type of software. Time will tell.

However, reading the details on that article kinda makes me excited as well (although marketing). A decent modular design? CMake as build system. (Unit) testing! Check, check, check.
If code quality is good along with good performance and if they can keep up the development pace I can see this growing into something interesting for the open source community.
 
Additionally, Lumberyard is a fork of Crytek's proprietary engine (CryEngine). Crytek just keeps developing CryEngine and that's it. It's not at all clear who is actually supposed to work on Lumberyard/o3de.
 
shkhln said:
Additionally, Lumberyard is a fork of Crytek's proprietary engine (CryEngine). Crytek just keeps developing CryEngine and that's it. It's not at all clear who is actually supposed to work on Lumberyard/o3de.
Click to expand...
The Venturebeat article claims Amazon "has rewritten the code from scratch". I find that difficult to believe, but the claim is the code is completely unencumbered with patents or copyrights.
 
Huh? I merely thought Amazon bought do-whatever-you-want rights to the version of the code. At that time Crytek wasn't in the best financial shape to put it mildly, so that [the previous sentence] sounds plausible to me. Although open-sourcing engine is a bit of a stretch.
 
shkhln said:
old.reddit.com

Amazon Lumberyard is Dead. Long live Open 3D Engine (O3DE)

Lumberyard was essentially three engines smooshed into one. The acquired DoubleHelix tech, CryTek, and all the Lumberyard specific code that was...
old.reddit.com old.reddit.com
Some info about rewritten parts.
Click to expand...
It does seem to be most of the Crytek parts... I am skeptical of the claims of the Verge article because non-technical people love the idea of a "clean rewrite", though those almost never happen, and for good reasons.
 
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