![]() ![]() Here the UE4 experience is relatively painless: using the Blueprint object system you can wire up complicated games and game logic in a graphical editor, with no writing of code involved, although C++-based development is possible for various levels of customization. ![]() Many users are likely to be graphics artists or similar who have little interest in the internals of the tools which they’re using. At its core, this experience allows for the most essential feature of a good game engine: the ability to create games without having to pick a fight with the engine’s tools or build system. To build the game, you press a single button and out rolls a game for any of the wide range of supported target platforms. This then creates a dedicated editor for the project that is also the game, so you can edit it while having a live preview window you can interact with. ![]() Afterwards a wizard allows for the creation of a new game project using an optional template. Installing UE4 takes a few steps: after installing the Epic launcher using its installer and logging in with an Epic Games account, it takes a few clicks to install any of a range of available versions of UE4. The development experience with the Hammer editor in the late 1990s was pretty much WYSIWYG, and when I was just getting started with Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) a number of years back this was pretty much the same experience, making it relatively easy to hit the ground running. This meant that some expectations were set before encountering today’s game engines and their tools. My own game development attempts started with the Half Life engine and the Valve Hammer editor, as well as the Doom map editor. A closer look reveals however that O3DE is Lumberyard, but with many parts of Lumberyard replaced, including the renderer still in the process of being rewritten from the old CryEngine code. When reading through the marketing materials, one might be forgiven for thinking that O3DE is the best thing since sliced 3D bread, and is Amazon’s benevolent gift to the unwashed masses to free them from the chains imposed on them by proprietary engines like Unity and Unreal Engine. As Lumberyard is based on CryEngine 3.8 (~2015 vintage), this raises the question of whether this new open source engine – creatively named Open 3D Engine ( O3DE) – is an open source version of a CryTek engine, and what this brings to those of us who like to tinker with 2D, 3D games and similar. Recently Amazon announced that they would be open sourcing the 3D engine and related behind their Amazon Lumberyard game tooling effort. ![]()
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