Engine Access
Engine Access
Installation Options
Both Lumberyard and Unity offer installers to install the game engines. Lumberyard only supports Windows as a platform, whereas Unity Windows and Mac. Lumberyard comes in a single installation package where the installation is customizable. Unity on the other hand offers tiers – Personal, Plus, and Pro. They also support tailored solutions for larger teams through Unity Enterprise.
The Lumberyard installation process is not entirely smooth, since there’s a need to use the command line to compile the game engine. There’s no one-click like method to resolve all dependencies, and can often be a tedious process. Unity installation is fairly straightforward where the installer takes care of pretty much everything.
Compiling the code/engine (precompiled vs runtime compilation)
Installing Lumberyard may require a developer to build the entire engine from scratch. For most use cases, this is a necessary step and can take more than an hour just for the compilation itself. And it’s not just a one-time installation burder. Creating a new project or enabling/disabling gems in a project requires configuring the Editor again. While it may not need an entire engine compilation, it still requires configuring solutions and compiling the game code through command line.
Unity does not require any explicit compilation of the engine. Once installed, any runtime compilation happens in the engine itself during loading a project, or in the background as the project is being updated.
Access to engine code
Lumberyard’s source code is freely and openly available to download and modify. There are licenses in place that prevent or regulate redistribution of the software. Developers are free to dive into the engine code and make changes that are suited to them. Lumberyard’s main revenue comes through its integration with paid AWS services. Unity source code is not freely available to use, but the license can be purchased from them. Their tailored solutions for enterprises puts an additional layer of access between users and the engine.
Creating/Configuring Project
Process
Creating a project in Unity is simple and straightforward. You can create a new project either from the Home Screen of the Unity Editor, or by navigating to File->New project in the menu bar on the Editor. The Project Wizard allows opening up an existing or creating a new project. You can customize the project creation by marking the project as a 2D or 3D project and importing assets from an asset package or the Unity Asset Store. Unity then compiles the project and the scripts in the assets and opens up the project for you.
Lumberyard project configuration happens through its Project Configurator. You can create an empty or a sample project. Project creation can take up 10 minutes where Lumberyard compiles all the files. Once the project is created, you can configure gems into the project. To select which project to open up in the Editor, Lumberyard requires the user to set a project as default in the project configurator (a button on the top right corner).
Solutions
Unity game code exists as a set of scripts. Unity has its own metadata on the existing scripts and other components. By default, Unity supports MonoDevelop for writing scripts, but also let’s the user choose their own default IDE for scripting, including Visual Studio.
Lumberyard solely uses Visual Studio for scripting purposes. Engine and Game code is distributed between various Visual Studio solutions. No other IDE is supported.