Open 3D Foundation releases Open 3D Engine 23.10

The Open 3D Foundation has released Open 3D Engine 23.10, the latest version of the “AAA-capable” open-source game engine.

Changes include support for ray traced reflections and mesh instancing in the Atom renderer, and an experimental new Document Property Editor for tools developers.

Non-game-developers get new features for developing robotics simulations, while new third-party add-ons include shader-authoring and volumetric clouds systems.

An open-source ‘AAA-capable’ game engine based on AWS’s Lumberyard

First announced in 2021, 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 hardware-accelerated ray tracing renderer Atom.

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.

O3DE 23.10: ray traced reflections and mesh instancing in the Atom renderer

O3DE 23.10 features number of graphics improvements, with Atom getting support for ray traced reflections and mesh instancing.

Performance improvements include better memory allocation in DirectX and Vulkan.

The update also lays the work for future changes, with a new framework for multi-GPU support, and the “start” of mobile support for iOS and Android.

New features for tools development and visual scripting

Developers get an experimental new Document Property Editor, intended to enable tool creators to write editors without having to “dive into the complexities inherent in Qt-based UI, element sorting, or user-driven filtering”.

Script Canvas, O3DE’s visual programming system, gets new ‘compact nodes’ intended to handle simple operations while taking up less visual space in the node graph.

There are also a number of workflow improvements when installing other users’ content created in O3DE, and when exporting projects to Windows, Linux and iOS.

Updates to the ROS2 Gem for robotics simulation

Outside game development, there are updates to the ROS2 Gem added in O3DE 23.05, which integrates the Robot Operating System, a set of open libraries for creating robot sims.

Changes include a new contact sensor, performance improvements to the camera and LIDAR sensors, and support for finger and vacuum grippers.

New third-party shader authoring and volumetric clouds Gems

New user-created add-ons include RenderJoy 2.0, a clone of shader-authoring system ShaderToy for O3DE, and a volumetric cloudscapes Gem.

Both were created by developer and former AWS graphics software engineer Galib Arrieta.

Price and system requirements

Compiled binaries of Open 3D Engine 23.10 are available as free downloads for Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 Linux. The source code is available under an Apache 2.0 licence.