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Amazon has steadily been making inroads into the gaming space in the last couple of years. Now, they’ve announced Lumberyard, a free 3D game engine. Lumberyard can be used to develop for PC and consoles, but thats not the only thing that makes it so interesting. Capitalizing on the acquisition of Twitch, Amazon has built Twitch tools directly into the engine, allowing developers to more easily integrate Twitch features and connectivity.
Lumberyard is free to download- Amazon plans to make all money off of multiplayer features and web services supporting the games. To that end, Lumberyard, which is currently in beta, is being rolled out alongside a multiplayer service called GameLift. GameLife has a $1.50 per 1,000 daily active user fee plus any other standard fees for Amazon Web Services that may be used. GameLife is billed as a convenient way of including and deploying multiplayer features. Since these features are normally out of range for smaller developers, this should allow developers to include features they might otherwise cut.
Other tools in Lumberyard also include Twitch ChatPlay, which will allow viewers to use Twitch chat to control the game- basically it’s baked in “Twitch Plays” support. And they also have a feature called Twitch JoinIn that will allow broadcasters to invite audience members into their games.
With Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 having royalty and licensing fees if a project launches, having a solution that could be potentially 100% free if you don’t use Amazon’s web services, Lumberyard is certainly looking like it might shake up the existing development space for a lot of developers. Of course, we’ll need to see how the first Lumberyard developed games fare, but seeing some diversity in the game engine market certainly can’t be a bad thing.
Check out Amazon’s Lumberyard announcment video below:
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February 9th, 2016 by
We’re always being told that piracy is killing the media we view, from television to films to video games. Now it seems that one piracy group has decided to call the video game industry’s bluff on that.
Chinese group 3DM were in the news last month talking about how it’s getting harder to crack video game anti-piracy software and have pledged that for a year they will not crack any single-player game starting February 8th, just to see what sort of an effect it has on legitimate sales of the game. Instead they will focus their efforts on localising games for their local market.
“We just had an internal meeting. Starting at the Chinese New Year, 3DM will not crack any single-player games. We’ll take a look at the situation in a year’s time to see if genuine sales have grown.” a representative of the group said on the group’s blog on TorrentFreak.
Piracy debates have raged for years, and just gotten worse since the advent of the Internet and its growth. There’s certainly been arguments on both sides of the debate so it will be interesting to see if this does have any effect on sales.
Mark February 8th 2017 down in your calendars, that’s about when you can expect to see 3DM’s results made public.
Rise of the Tomb Raider, the sequel to 2013’s excellent reboot of the franchise has been out on the Xbox One for some time now (Scarelt Dragon loves it.). It just landed on the PC, and expectations are high for the newest installment in the beloved franchise. Fortunately, Digmbot has gone hands on with the game and has a full breakdown on the PC specific features, the port’s performance and the gameplay. Click the video below. You know you want to.
Reported today is news on the availability of Fallout 4 mods coming to game consoles. Fallout 4 is a post-apocalyptic role playing game, set across a sprawling world and influenced by the post-war 1950s. The game gives players a huge amount of content to explore and many hours to invest. However, the PC community has been taking things a step further since its availability on that platform.
The PC gaming community is known for making mods to games. Mods are basically community developed game add-ins that can enhance gameplay or add in additional content for almost any purpose. For console gamers, the ability to use Mods has never been available for any game. Things may be looking up for those wishing to have this feature on their Xbox One, however.
In a recent tweet, the official Fallout Twitter account, responded to a fan’s inquiry about Mods on consoles, with:
@Godly_shit1 we’ll be sharing more details soon. stay tuned.
While not official confirmation about this feature coming to consoles or when a date has been set, we can have at least a tiny bit of hope that it’ll be sooner, rather than later. With the Xbox One now running Windows 10, we do know that the Xbox One would receive this feature due to running the same OS as its PC counterpart. The goal for Bethesda would be to add these Mods seamlessly into the gameplay with upcoming DLC packs.
With this new information, what mods from the PC version of Fallout 4 would you like to see on the Xbox One or Playstation 4? Let us know in the comments.
Bethesda have entered into a partnership with Japanese toymaker ThreeZero to produce a meticulously crafted and detailed Fallout 4 figurine of a player in a Power Armour frame.
However, as you might expect, such things do not come cheap. The price tag is set around $400, or in pounds about £279. Owch. However, compared to other figurines it’s actually quite cheap and international postage is also free. If that softens the blow of the price tag any, let me know…
It stands at 14.5 inches tall and is fully posable with 35 points of articulation, which include the fingers. The head can also swap for a helmet with LED light up function which requires batteries that aren’t included. The outer armour pieces are detachable and will be compatible with other upcoming Fallout 4 figures in power armour. Also an AER-9 Laser Rifle because.
