When comparing Amethyst vs Gamebryo, the Slant community recommends Amethyst for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Amethyst is ranked 26th while Gamebryo is ranked 41st. The most important reason people chose Amethyst is:
Amethyst is published under the MIT license making it open-source and id offered completely free. This allows anyone to give the tiling window manger a try, which is great.
Specs
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Pros
Pro It's free and open-source
Amethyst is published under the MIT license making it open-source and id offered completely free. This allows anyone to give the tiling window manger a try, which is great.
Pro Recently updated and rewritten in Swift.
The application was written in Objective-C, but was recently updated and completely rewritten in Apple's new native language Swift.
Pro Works with keyboard shortcuts, no mouse needed
As it's designed to work closely to how xmonad, Amethyst uses keyboard shortcuts to control the windows being used, meaning no mouse input is necessary. This can make for a faster way to control windows.
Pro Multi-monitor suppport
Pro Has many common layouts to choose from (fullscreen, floating, row, column, wide, etc)
Pro Can switch between tiling and floating mode
Pro Under active development
Pro Configured via UI
No CONFIG file provides security and will avoid making amethyst crash. Instead configured via simple UI
Pro True tiling means never losing track of windows under a huge pile of others
Pro Flexible and extensible modular architecture
Gamebryo has been written in C++. Because its features are as independent of each other as possible, it allows including only the features that are necessary for a game. Also because the abstract interface and its implementation are separate, custom implementations can be made as well as default implementation extended by inheritance.
Pro Many References
Gamebryo supports Windows, XBOX360, PS3, and WII. Several hundred cormercial titles have been developed with Gamebryo, including The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, Catherine, RockSmith, and etc.
Pro Good documentations
Gamebryo has detailed documentations. It is provided in html files and its size is about several thounsand pages. It also includes several dozens of tutorials and demos.
Cons
Con Can be buggy at times
Con There are more user friendly window managers available
There are certainly more user friendly window managers available for MacOS, such as Divvy or Moom. Amethyst, however, is more powerful and customizable than the more user friendly options available and therefore may be a better choice for a user looking for more advanced capabilities and customization.
Con Difficult to get a license for
They have worked with proven game studios, but starting developers or indie studios have to request an evaluation to use and license the software. Licensing fees are also not disclosed.