whats the point?

The point is to leap from tree to tree and enjoy the smell of fresh cut timber.

For me, being tied to Amazon's cloud is a deal-breaker -- I realize you can choose to run your own (and with linux, docker, chef, etc. that's not an insurmountable challenge) and probably would choose to run my own -- but being locked in otherwise I don't feel good about, especially when I don't think AWS is particularly great, or particularly innexpensive. I think Azure has the better offering of any of the cloud providers, TBH (though, disclosure, I work for Microsoft and near enough to Azure to know some people over there) especially when you consider the greater number and geographic spread of data-center regions, but still, I don't want to be contractually obligated to forego other cloud providers that I might think provide the best value for my needs.

Furthermore, I can't think that cloud-hosting revenues alone on their end would make this a worthwhile venture. They've got to be going after micro-transactions (or perhaps its already included in their definition of cloud services) IMO -- and you pretty much can't roll your own payment processing solution without a whole lot of work and without taking on a lot of security considerations and all the risk that entails.

Really, dude. Sack?

Well, what is the actual code like? What data structures is it referring to? Before ragging on someone about misspelling something in code you should also confirm you aren't misreading it. I've worked with 'sacks' in code many times before with a few different meanings, but usually when I read 'sack' it has been "This is memory/storage of some kind which we don't actually need to care about the details of its structure, which will be defined and handled elsewhere".

I wouldn't be surprised if in a few months amazon launched a relatively cheap games console as a loss leader after roping studios into porting for it. Perhaps a mid range x86 based device with a hdmi port.

They did this with Amazon fire TV stick and the amazon fire TV box, which are marketed as TV and causal gaming devices. With a game engine, some developers and a device they could start offering a games console at a quarter of the price of the xbox one and ps4, using lumberyard as incentive to studios already familiar with cryengine.

Just my own personal thoughts on the possible future...

Good point... question is, will a free engine be enough incentive for studios to port enough games to the console, so the game lineup might convince buyers the not-so-great hardware (just guessing here, based on other Amazon devices) is actually worth even the low price asked for it? Its a hen and eggs dilemma with every new console.

The next Ouya?

Well Amazon have been recruiting for both permanent game developers and contractors at least since 2009. I have recruiters claiming to be recruiting for them every couple of months or so contacting me looking for people with XBOX or Playstation dev experience. I haven't seen anything from Amazon to warrant this and I'd always assumed it was just to develop their console versions of their media player apps but, they could be working on something bigger.

However if they did release a console I'd expect it just to be an Android / Fire box just a little souped up.

Except porting is probably close to free for all games that currently cryengine so that's a base of AAA games ready to go there.

Yep, all those many CryEngine games
Also, porting from one version of Cry to the next ie not simple, let alone a whole different fork from 2014.

Beat me to it :)

Yes, there are AAA games based on CryEngine. They are actually pretty good in some cases. I don't think I could count them on one hand, but its getting close (and counting the ones that I know of, its maybe two hands... besides CryTeks own games its Armoured Warfare).

Don't forget that Amazon already started altering the engine, so as time goes by and Amazon tinkers with the engine, porting will get more and more difficult without rework (and given the current popularity of CryEngine with developers (as opposed to players), they will want to tinker a lot, as soon as possible... going free isn't enough anymore, not in 2016).

Well, what is the actual code like? What data structures is it referring to? Before ragging on someone about misspelling something in code you should also confirm you aren't misreading it.

You should assume that I did of course confirm that before making a total fool out of myself. The code is most certainly about "stack", not "sack". The function contains a call to getrlimit followed by setrlimit (both on RLIMIT_STACK), along with error checking and such. The code as such looks perfectly alright, too.

Also note that I'm not ragging someone for a typo. Everybody makes mistakes, and typos in particular (I probably make 200 or 300 of them per day), I'm not blaming someone for being human. What I said was that:

1. the typo is obviously there, and while it's inconsequential for the functionality, it is there in a public, shipped, end-user ready release
2. it was propagated to another place (presumably via auto-complete)
3. it's so striking as if someone was hitting you with a rod when you glance over the source (at least for me, YMMV), yet, nobody noticed, nobody cared, it shipped like that
4. which means: either no peer-review, and no reviewing your own code before you go public takes place, or whatever review happens is useless
5. it took me about 10 seconds looking into the first random file out of (approx.) 25,000 files to spot that typo
6. this suggests that there are probably similar things (which possibly are not inconsequential) in the other files

Combine that with the experience that I had from Amazon Fire when it launched, and with the general experience delivered by Amazon Prime Music (which still does not work properly after many months). This led me into saying: "I expect Amazon to fuck this up", and the spot-silly-error-within-10-seconds thing confirmed me in that belief.

Amazon Fire is just great, isn't it, you plug it in and it boots up in like 30 seconds, you set your WiFi password and pronto, you can watch movies. Awesome. Except when you're German and movie titles are therefore in German, too (containing umlauts).

I forgot the name of the actual movie which struck me 10 seconds after looking at Fire for the first time, so I'll just make one up... let's say, Gefährliche Leidenschaft (which is as good as any other title with an umlaut in it). Amazon Fire would display that as something like Gef°|~liche Leidenschaft. Which is -- as you can immediately tell -- because they assumed the entire world speaks ANSI but movie titles -- surprise, surprise -- come in UTF-8 as they can contain non-english characters. Which of course you never notice looking at English titles, since in that case ANSI == UTF-8.

This issue was fixed in an automatic update some 3 weeks later. Was it a bit issue? Well... no, and yes. Sure, I can watch movies with garbled names just fine, not a biggie. Also, it was eventually fixed.

But what's important is, it shows that whoever was in charge of preparing that product for market, get it localized and stuff, didn't even care to invest 20 seconds to look at it once. He simply gave a fuck. How can you possibly give your approval for releasing a product when you can see with the first glance that something is not right?

The issue is not really that humans make mistakes. It's rather an issue with attitude. There are mistakes of the "Oh well, shit happens" or the "Oh, I didn't expect that" kind, and there are mistakes of the "Wow, how embarrassing, luckily I found it before someone else did" kind.

But there's also mistakes of the "You stupid fucker, did you even try it once, did you even look at what you shipped???" kind. That's the kind of mistake I blame. It's avoidable, if only you care about applying a minimum of diligence. As in, spend 2 minutes proof-reading, run unit tests, and spend 5 minutes checking whether everything at least looks as if it works as intended.

Sadly, this here:

"yes we fix, we make sefaul not happen by raise sack size OK?"

Indeed, I've seen it much worse (not in programming but maintenance). In a somewhat hyperbole way, something like...

• We have this problem XYZ, tried ABC but that does not work although I think it should, can you see if 123 will fix it?
• Yes, OK, no problem (starts deleting random files).
• Wait, what are you doing! Stop!
• Yes, OK, no problem (deletes revision control data files, changes random user account settings, does other desastrous stuff)
• Stop what you are doing! Did you listen to me at all? Do you even understand the problem?
• Yes, yes. OK. (throws backup tapes into the shredder)

That's kind of funny to watch when it's not your work (or your computer). But otherwise it's not nearly as amusing. Somehow the people who don't understand very well what you're saying are always the same people who are the most confident (...and incompetent) and the least listening. And somehow, no matter what you do, you always manage to get the very worst one on the phone.

Indeed, I've seen it much worse (not in programming but maintenance). In a somewhat hyperbole way, something like...

• We have this problem XYZ, tried ABC but that does not work although I think it should, can you see if 123 will fix it?
• Yes, OK, no problem (starts deleting random files).
• Wait, what are you doing! Stop!
• Yes, OK, no problem (deletes revision control data files, changes random user account settings, does other desastrous stuff)
• Stop what you are doing! Did you listen to me at all? Do you even understand the problem?
• Yes, yes. OK. (throws backup tapes into the shredder)

That's kind of funny to watch when it's not your work (or your computer). But otherwise it's not nearly as amusing. Somehow the people who don't understand very well what you're saying are always the same people who are the most confident (...and incompetent) and the least listening. And somehow, no matter what you do, you always manage to get the very worst one on the phone.

Oh they understand. That's just the Russian Mafia taking over your project

You should assume that I did of course confirm that before making a total fool out of myself. The code is most certainly about "stack", not "sack".

Well you posted a partial code snippet with no real context as to structure, and you wouldn't be the first programmer I've met to go "Lulz, WTF kind of moron misspelled stack?" (which was actually the second and last day on the job for an intern on one project. One does not call a Russian programmer who has been writing code for longer than you've been alive a moron and expect it to go over well.)

Assuming things is one of the ways buggy code gets out the door.

Sacks may also be implemented as Stacks, so don't forget that. "Sack" in code is often just "Here Be Memory: We'll figure the rest out later."

Yes, lets make a massive deal out of a minor mistake in code with no context as to it's age and reason for existing... and lets call it unprofessional while ranting like some kinda of know it all child...

GRAMMAR NAZI MODE ON

"Kind of know" or "Kinda know" but not "Kinda of know" which would expand into "Kind of of know".

GRAMMAR NAZI MODE OFF

I'm sorry but i had to correct this, someone was wrong on the internet! Of course it most likely was a typo but it needed corrected as if we learned one thing from this thread it's that this one sentence i read is probably a good way to measure your error rate which is at least 1 per sentence, always!