Lumber yard

A lumber yard is a location where lumber and wood-related products used in construction and/or home improvement projects are processed or stored. Some lumber yards offer retail sales to consumers, and some of these may also provide services such as the use of planers, saws and other large machines.

Generally, timber yards are locations where raw logs and other wood or forest products are processed and stored. The terms "lumber yard" and "timber yard" are sometimes used interchangeably, and timber yards may include additional aspects that lumber yards encompass, and vice versa.

Overview

Lumber yards sell products made at lumber mills, where customers pick up products at the yard themselves or request that an order be built and delivered to them by the lumber yard. Lumber yards may also sell wood-plastic composites, such as Trex, any other type of construction material or supplies, and general hardware store items. Lumber yards are the primary resources for contractors and homeowners when construction material is needed. Home Depot stores also have lumber sections, but this may not be considered a lumber yard, although it serves the same purpose. Lumber yards use forklift trucks to move the large heavy units of lumber around the yard. Saws may also be available to cut boards to a desired length for customers.

Amazon Lumberyard

Amazon Lumberyard is a free AAA cross-platform game engine developed by Amazon Web Services integrated with AWS and Twitch – with full source code provided. Lumberyard provides a set of tools to create high-quality games, connect games to the computing power and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans on Twitch. Lumberyard helps major studios, indie developers, students and hobbyists build beautiful worlds, make realistic characters, and create stunning real-time effects.

Lumberyard is based on the architecture of CryEngine developed by Crytek, bought by Amazon in 2015. The engine includes capabilities to support Twitch streaming, and may also be patched to include Oculus compatibility.

Lumberyard is in beta now and is currently free to download and use for developing games for PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One. Amazon does not charge any royalty or subscription fees for Lumberyard, the monetization is implemented through the use of Amazon Web Services. In addition to Lumberyard, Amazon is also releasing a new managed service add-on for operating server-based online games on AWS, called GameLift. This will be a paid service and will be available only to developers who use Lumberyard.

Game engine

A game engine is a software framework designed for the creation and development of video games. Developers use them to create games for consoles, mobile devices and personal computers. The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine (“renderer”) for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support, and a scene graph. The process of game development is often economized, in large part, by reusing/adapting the same game engine to create different games, or to make it easier to "port" games to multiple platforms.

Purpose

In many cases game engines provide a suite of visual development tools in addition to reusable software components. These tools are generally provided in an integrated development environment to enable simplified, rapid development of games in a data-driven manner. Game engine developers attempt to "pre-invent the wheel" by developing robust software suites which include many elements a game developer may need to build a game. Most game engine suites provide facilities that ease development, such as graphics, sound, physics and AI functions. These game engines are sometimes called "middleware" because, as with the business sense of the term, they provide a flexible and reusable software platform which provides all the core functionality needed, right out of the box, to develop a game application while reducing costs, complexities, and time-to-market — all critical factors in the highly competitive video game industry.Gamebryo, JMonkey Engine and RenderWare are such widely used middleware programs.