Category: Technical How-to

Author(s): Starr Shaw, Technical Artist for O3DE / John Kennedy, Head of Product for Amazon Lumberyard and O3DE Developers like code. Developers like demos. But game developers, in our experience, REALLY like code and demos. And we’re looking to share some code and demos with you! After all, when you’re starting to create a new […]

In recent years, game development has become increasingly distributed. In 2020, COVID-19 accelerated the demand and innovation for remote solutions. Game teams of all shapes and sizes were left with two choices: rush to take home workstations and then use their virtual private network (VPN) to access the office, or leave office development workstations and […]

Online multiplayer games have a long list of requirements to provide the best possible experience for players: game clients need identities that can securely access the game backend, backend services are required to host functionalities like matchmaking and player data, and you need a scalable way to host game sessions. In this post you’ll learn […]

Game analytics can be a powerful tool to help studios throughout the development cycle. Insights driven from game data can help you to create more engaging, personalized experiences for players and more efficiently monetize games. it can also help with fraud investigations, as well as performance monitoring and error reporting. Anomaly detection is commonly used […]

Epic Games is a leading interactive entertainment company responsible for some of the world’s largest games including Fortnite, and also develops Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine is a world leading open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool. Continuously evolving, it not only powers the world’s leading games, it also offers creators across industries the freedom and […]

Hi, my name is Joshua Rainbolt, and I’m a Lead Senior User Experience Designer for AWS Game Tech. I am one of several stakeholders who have been lucky enough to be involved with the evolution of Amazon Lumberyard’s prefab system over the past several years. We called them “slices” at the time, because our team […]

Online multiplayer games, such as multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBA), are becoming increasingly popular. One option for game server hosting is to use on-premises data centers, which require multi-year contracts for a set number of resources. As the number of players for a given game grows, developers have to determine what to do if they […]

Authored by Rajiv Puvvada, Senior Software Development Engineer, Amazon Lumberyard. Introduction Online multiplayer isn’t just a feature for many games; it’s core component of gameplay. It has to be performant; it has to be reliable; and it has to be stable. And, perhaps to no-one’s surprise, developing online multiplayer is hard — especially when poor […]

Authored by Chanelle Mosquera and Doug Erickson of the Amazon Lumberyard team. For over 5 years, Amazon Lumberyard‘s graphics engine has served our customers in fine stead. As we looked to our future, we recognized that its fixed approach to rendering and its established feature set would limit our customers’ ability to innovate and take advantage […]

Authored by David Greer, Senior Engineer on Amazon Lumberyard Several fundamental mathematical functions in our existing library were calculated using approximations with rather poor accuracy. This post describes how we were able to dramatically improve accuracy without compromising performance. Reciprocal Square Root The first function we turned our attention to was reciprocal square root. This […]