Category: Technical How-to

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 […]

Building a game to serve worldwide users over the internet can be challenging. In this two-part series, we’ll walk you through how game developers improve the player experience worldwide in order to deploy more efficiently, achieve lower latency, improve in-game performance, and deliver game content faster. In this first post, we focus on how to […]

Authored by Karl Berg, Principal Engineer on Amazon Lumberyard Nothing pushes the computational power of modern computers quite like real-time 3D games. From the vector algebra used to transform 3D scenes to 2D screen space, to the visibility queries used for rendering and AI, to the deformation of surfaces around bones for characters, to the […]

Hello! I‘m Mike Cronin, a programmer writer with the Lumberyard documentation team. I’ve been a long time game developer, going all the way back to the days when arcades were still a thing. I’ve worked as an artist, animator, technical director, and as an engineer (of sorts). One aspect I like best about working with […]

AWS Game Tech is excited to announce “Building Games on AWS” — a new YouTube series pioneered by Game Tech Solutions Architects that focuses on teaching game developers how to use AWS for game-related workflows. This series will take learnings and best practices from working with customers to help game studios use AWS to make […]

Authored by Molly Sheets and edited by Kyle Somers Today’s games need specialized content to increase retention, drive monetization, and promote feature adoption. No game has a singular player persona: Two players can have vastly different engagement metrics and styles of play over their lifetime with a portfolio. Indie developers and AAA developers alike are […]