Not having an asset store is stopping me from learning this

If you're trying to learn game development, I would strongly suggest you start with a widely-adopted engine. Unity and Unreal have masses of assets, tutorials, learning materials, etc. By comparison, Lumberyard has virtually nil, and the number of devs using it is minuscule. It needs a big push to start to develop an ecosystem, and right now it's not getting it.

Lumberyard has a lot of potential, and one day might leave beta and get the promotion it requires, but for right now I'd say it's a terrible choice for a learner.

Starter game has a bunch of assets. As does the new PhysXSamples with the Cowboy character in 1.23.

Theres probably a lot of thinks we may be missing, so I would be curious as to what assets do you think are missing wrt to learning Lumberyard?

Well, I don't think it's about a lack of particular assets that prevents someone from learning Lumberyard, specifically.

But, the OP is talking about learning game development, generally. In that case, picking one of the major engines gives you the choice of countless books, thousands of hours of quality tutorials, from Unity Learn, Youtube, Udemy, Pluralsight, and on and on.

Then, when you've learned enough to start attempting something on your own, there are huge libraries of assets available to select from, giving you endless possibilities to experiment and learn from.

So, it's not that a lack of specific assets literally prevents you from learning Lumberyard, but a question of why you'd choose Lumberyard when it lacks all those benefits, and will likely make for a harder path. I'd love to see Lumberyard become competitive with those other engines, but we all know that's not happening at the moment.

@REDACTEDUSER

I have to say I agree with @REDACTEDUSER

Lumberyard does have the potential to do great things with it, but it's just too complex for a beginner to start with it. Unity assumes beginner level of understanding and explains things as such, and Unreal has a huge in-depth set of documentation, examples and community support. As much as they've tried to get away from it, I consider lumberyard much more akin to Cry Engine in the sense that it's a powerful engine with lots of bells and whistles but you really need to have an existing base level of understanding of development in general before you can really be productive with it.

I do feel bad for the devs when we make this type of criticism, because they try to look at what specifically might be missing, and how they could improve.

The fundamental problem is that Lumberyard is clearly not getting the kind of investment it needs to become a significant player.

Bearing in mind that even Godot, which is essentially a couple of guys supported on Patreon, has an asset store, has just held the latest GodotCon, and has a clear roadmap to their new Vulkan renderer. Whereas Lumberyard is a project from Amazon, has none of that, and still languishes in beta after 4 years without even a roadmap!

Hardly anyone is interested in it, because almost no employers are looking for those skills. And if a studio did select Lumberyard, they would have very little chance of recruiting anyone with experience. It's a vicious cycle, and the ecosystem is not going to grow unless Amazon decides to invest seriously in Lumberyard, and compete with the other big engines.

This is great feedback. I'm going to let our demo and samples team know.

BTW Hopefully folks have seen the getting started guides and videos (that I hope are helpful).

This is great place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1NgI8urJ7o

Personally I agree that an asset store should be a priority. Can't imagine it would be difficult for Amazon to roll one out. And community/paid Gems and Assets being central and accessible would potentially greatly increase engine functionality and community activity (with proper store curation).

Using assets from other stores may require modification, although it is usually painless (depending on the asset and quality): Materials in LY use specular workflow and have some naming conventions for textures, animation orientation is slightly different, physics collision may require additional setup . . . but you can reach out on the forums if you are having issues, or on either of the Discord servers, and of course review the docs and tutorials.

Despite this, I agree there is a steep learning curve for raw beginners. But its rapidly improving with each incremental release, so i hope you hang in there!

could you buy assets from one of the other stores and convert them to lumberyard?

edit: google says unreal and unity uses .fbx so i would think the stores would give you usable assets.

edit2: did some more looking into it and unity packages the assets u download from the store as .unitypackage so u need to extract the file from it with an other app

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=280&v=eyNcX9QSNgI&feature=emb_logo

https://unitypackage-unpacker.software.informer.com/1.0/

It depends on the type of assets we're talking about. Things like models and animations tend to be in standard formats, and can be transferred between engines without too much trouble. Materials tend to be more troublesome, since different engines treat them differently.

But when you start looking at more complex assets - things that contain code, blueprints, physics, etc, then they're not portable between engines at all.

very true i didnt think about the code side of things. i guess maybe someone could make a store and the community here could add code and asset to it. i would but im lazy lol.

Lol. I wouldn't worry about being being lazy - the main point of competition in modern game engines is to let developers achieve as much as possible, as easily as possible. If this were a little non-profit open-source project, then we could have a conversation about the community taking on the creation of an asset store.

But as this is a product from one of the largest and richest corporations on Earth, I really think it's up to them!

Even a proper website would be the first step. The forum is only linked half way down the downloads page. I only found it by coincidence. An asset store is also a must have. It gives people an incentive to use the engine and creates the opportunity to earn money selling assets. That will drive more development for the engine as more people gain experience in creating assets it also builds a talent pool for game studios to hire from.

In reality it would take a day or 2 to setup a website with an asset store and some proper navigation since most of the difficult work has been done already. When I pick a system to bet my success on I want to see that there is progress being made. I want to see that it is being seriously developed and not just some back burner project in a corner

Lumberyard needs a proper site with: Home Page Blog Gallery Roadmap Forum Asset store / free assets Documentation / Tutorials

Like I said most of the hard work has already been done. It just needs to be organized and displayed as a proper website, with proper navigation.

I have been watching this project for over 2 years and this is the first time I have even seen the forum. I still haven't invested my time to download the engine.

They will implement it sooner. But as a time being I am focusing on trying to do things myself. The reason I will chose Lumberyard over Unity or Unreal is its real-time capabilities. If you observe game development carefully they are aiming for ray tracing. And the first candidate for game engine on that category is Cryengine. And now you have Lumberyard. I don't think that Unreal and Unity can match Cryengine and Lumberyard on that category. Because it has something to do with its core code. If you watch Unreal talks about their Global Illumination. It is funny that they warn their developer not to use that on forest. And in Cryengine you can normally use that. And you don't need to bake everything Because it is in real-time. Lumberyard can be user-friendly as time goes by like Unreal and Unity. But Unreal and Unity will struggle to implement real-time lighting because their lighting needs baking. They can try but they need to change the core of their engine.

@REDACTEDUSER https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/latest/userguide/configurator-intro.html But what the Community answered you here can also help even starting with other resources ...Thanks!