Open 3D Foundation releases Open 3D Engine 22.10
The Open 3D Foundation has released Open 3D Engine (O3DE) 22.10, the latest stable release of the new open-source “AAA-capable” game engine based on Amazon Web Services’ Lumberyard engine.
The release introduces new Sky Atmosphere and Stars components and an experimental new Terrain system that can “handle 16km x 16km worlds and beyond at high framerates”.
An open-source ‘AAA-capable’ game engine based on AWS’s Lumberyard
First announced last year, O3DE is an open-source, cross-platform “AAA-capable” game engine” pitched as a successor to Lumberyard, AWS’s free engine.
It features a modular, SDK-like design, open-source build system and new networking stack, and includes Atom, the firm’s hardware-accelerated ray tracing renderer, also available open-source.
The engine is the first release of the new Linux-Foundation-backed Open 3D Foundation: a counterpart to VFX technology body the Academy Software Foundation for the game development industry.
New features for creating large open-world game environments
Key changes in Open 3D Engine 22.10 include the new O3DE Terrain system, currently in preview.
The online documentation is pretty barebones, but according to the release notes, the new system can “handle 16km x 16km worlds and beyond at high framerates”.
“Developers who have found O3DE best for … smaller or more enclosed environments [can now] start start working on larger-scale worlds with significant performance improvements for both editing and runtime.”
You can find about more about how the new terrain system was designed in the video at the top of the story.
The update also introduces a new Stars Component for generating physically-based, resolution-independent animated stars (they twinkle realistically), and a new Sky Atmosphere component.
Animation improvements and other features
Workflow improvements listed in the release notes include “animation import, root motion extraction, and motion matching”, the latter being the experimental motion synthesis system introduced in O3DE 22.05.
Outside the artist toolsets, the release also features improvements to the process of setting up and debugging multiplayer games, and onboarding new team members into Open 3D Engine projects.
Availability and system requirements
Compiled binaries of Open 3D Engine 22.10 are available as free downloads for Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04+. The source code is available under an Apache 2.0 licence.
Read a full list of new features in O3DE 22.10 in the release notes