Projects

Projects

The Unity project and Lumberyard project serve very similar purposes. Although, switching projects within Unity is much smoother, since you don’t need to leave the editor when you select to open a new project. Project transfer also isn’t as user friendly because it could require a recompile of the game rather than just import and play. Unlike Unity where projects can be located anywhere, Lumberyard projects must be located within the Amazon Lumberyard installation dev folder. This restriction may seem insignificant at first, but it stops you from having the freedom of being able to organize your projects.

Levels/Scenes

Lumberyard levels are analogous to Unity scenes, where in both cases the object must be located within the project folder in order to be opened. Each have data associated with them, however Unity’s packaging is in scene format where no scene data can be altered from the file explorer but with Lumberyard this isn’t packaged as tightly. [expand]

Creating Builds

Unity has streamlined the build process to be located within the editor and, on a successful build, all data is located within a folder specified by the user. Builds in Lumberyard are a multi-step process and require the editor, command line, and batch scripting. There is a 5 step process, each with sub-steps, for a successful build to be made. Unless the batch file is scripted with pauses, which the examples are not, an error can occur without alerting the developer, where Unity will just abort the build. The final step of a Lumberyard build is moving files to the right folders, which Unity does automatically for the developer. Lumberyard can deploy to PC and mobile devices without building the game, and selecting other platforms requires knowledge of command line options, unlike in Unity, these options are not all within the editor.