Lumberyard

LUMBERYARD

By Kevin Dackow and Zach Dixon

Description

"Lumberyard is a free game engine deeply integrated with AWS and Twitch... [that] provides a growing set of tools to help you create the highest quality games, engage massive communities of fans, and connect games to the vast compute and storage of the cloud." - Amazon.com

Overall, I would describe Lumberyard as one of the easiest engines to get running on VR quickly. If you want to produce a VR game using pre-made assets that looks good and is visually appealing, this engine allows that with nearly no prerequisite knowledge. Its 'Gems' system allows for users to very easily add what are essentially plugins (i.e. Gems = plugins) to any game they create, to minimize unnecessary burden on the designer while still affording maximum flexibility. By using this 'Gems' system, the user can pick and choose specifically what functionality they want for any given game, without being drowned in unneeded and often-confusing additional features. By allowing users to pick just a handful, it makes getting a simple VR game running on your headset easy.

Tutorial for Hello World:

  1. See below

Minimum/Recommended System Requirements:

Specs below are for running the engine, not for running it in VR. Minimum specs for VR are determined by headset.

Minimum:

Processor

3GHz quad-core processor

GPU

Nvidia driver version 368.81 or AMD driver version 16.15.2211 graphics car

Memory

8 GB RAM

60 GB minimum free disk space

Operating System

  • Windows 7 64-bit

  • Windows 8

  • Windows 10

Software

  • Visual Studio 2013

  • Visual Studio C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studios

Metrics

I felt that I fell at the Intermediate level on the metrics scale, given my experience with C++ and C#, and thus I have scaled it accordingly. I have also scaled it to make up for the fact that I have done a lot of the debugging myself and put that into the tutorial. Additionally, download time is not included.

Accessibility: The estimated time for someone to create Hello World in VR

  • Beginner: No coding or graphics experience | 5 hours

  • Intermediate: Some coding or graphics experience | 3 hours

  • Advanced: Both coding and graphics experience | 2 hours

  • Expert: A lot of experience with computer graphics, specifically with this software | <1 hour

Power: The engine's power - i.e. how much one can do with this

  • High: It allows for stunning creations and competes with the best game engines on the market.

Usage: Evaluation of software's use for the following purposes

  • Game design - it is entirely built for game design and affords a wealth of opportunities to game designers

  • Other - not really intended for other uses

Summary

Lumberyard is easily accessible to users of all skill types with all of the power of Cryengine minus the difficulty of navigating the source code. Though debugging minor problems in the source code is a pain, it is overall easy to get setup and running.

However, VR support is still in beta, so unexpected problems are not unusual. I (Zach) wasn't able to get VR working completely (only partially), while Kevin was.

Tutorial for Setting Up VR Game

To get a VR Ready Application up and running follow these steps:

  • Download Amazon Lumberyard. This will create three executables on your desktop:

    • Project Configurator - the project configuration tool for adding "Gems" (essentially plug-ins)

    • Editor - the actual GUI for making games

    • Lumberyard Setup Assistant - a GUI for managing installation paths and SDKs

  • Open the Setup Assistant and download all required SDKs from the required SDK page.

  • Download Amazon's VR Sample Project

  • Open the Project Configurator and select the VR Sample Project - click the Set as Default button

    • Note: enabled Gems should include Oculus, Vive, OpenVR, HMD Framework, and Video Playback

  • Open the Setup Assistant and download any newly required SDKs

  • Navigate to optional SDKs and download FFmpeg

    • To do this follow these steps, for whatever version of ffmpeg the software wants:

      • Download 'dev' and 'shared' versions from the FFmpeg site

      • Open 'C:\Amazon\Lumberyard\<version_number>\3rdParty'

      • Create a folder inside called FFmpeg

      • In the FFmpeg folder create a new folder with the version of FFmpeg that Amazon is looking for in the Setup Assistant

      • Go into the folder for the downloaded FFmpeg 'dev' version and copy the 'include' and 'lib' folders into the newly created 3rdParty/FFmpeg/3.2 folder.

      • Go into the folder for the downloaded FFmpeg 'shared' version and copy the 'bin' folder into the 3rdParty/FFmpeg/3.2 folder.

      • Refresh your Lumberyard Setup Assistant and check it.

      • (Source)

  • Rebuild your project following these steps

  • Setup your VR headset locally (in case of Vive, open SteamVR)

  • Open the editor

  • First, open the TV room demo and select the VR Preview box on the bottom right of the GUI if it has not been selected. Press the play button

    • Should render into SteamVR directly!

  • Next, create a new level within this project

  • You now have a blank project that you can render directly into VR!

  • For tutorials on how to build your first level, follow the Introduction to Lumberyard Editor