about 2 years ago I bought a CryEngine book very cheap (< 3 USD), and tried the SDK (it was free at that time), but was unable to set up the asset pipeline, even after I installed some software without very clean licensing background (of course I removed them afterwards). from the programming side Lua seems to be a bit annoying interim step, the book mentioned it as much slower than C++, so better to minimize its usage, just link the C++ stuff via Lua. probably fine and fast for prototyping.

personally I liked the editor, but did nothing deep. and the lack of documentation and tutorials kept me to stay with 3dgs, and then started with UE4 immediately when it was released, whose programming was also difficult for me in the beginning (and was undocumented). it requires a lot of reading and planning before moving on, but recently I have started to enjoy it as I remember Unity3 was much easier to start with, but the Pro price of 3-4 was too high, and 5 came too late after UE4 to try.

I read a book about game engine development some time ago, and they integrated LUA as scripting option.

The main idea behind this was that you can change things on the fly without need for recompiling (and even restarting I think).

In the end every engine needs some tiem and work to get into. At some point suddenly you understand the workflow and it will be a lot easier to continue. Especially with a well documented engine used by many people.
Google -> Stackoverflow -> Refactor

nice business oriented dicision from amazon , they are so under rated .

yeah lua is pretty much the commonly accepted scripting integration among engines , and other types of applications .

in game engines it is mostly used for small scripts where the requirement of said script is not computationaly expensive , the usual approach is to keep your main code in languages such as c++ , and only option to use lua in engines for small operations .

the last engine i downloaded that i thought is going to rock the world ,was havok's project anarchy , which "concluded" a while back , i have to say i expected more from those guys regarding the lack of proffesionality on the release of project anarchy , i could not even find working links for forums or such , and there were some unexpected oddities during and after installation .

havok released quite a good version of the engine though ,also very component based and such but quite complicated when it comes to project setup / building and coding .

seems like everyone wants to jump in the mobile support pool but not all jump very gracefully.

LOL!

No doubt Amazon's product will do well. Amazon has pretty much unlimited resources to develop, fund, support, and market anything. Much bigger pool of talent and $$$$ to draw from.

I'm surprised they didn't initially pursue buying out 3Dgamestudio.... Since it so bug free and user friendly.

, exactly, they are so big, and could use their products/amazon for advertising aswell

, interesting thought if it would been done in ~2011-2013, though they would have needed to replace Lite-C or heavily upgrade it plus things like add support for other platforms which is no minor deal (I quess), and ofcourse upgrade/replace the toolset (WED/MED).