When we last discussed the Lumberyard game engine, it was for the underwhelming 1.28 release, but we mostly talked about a number of great new features in development on the Lumberyard game engine. Today we learned another major milestone in the future of Lumberyard… it is no more. From this point on, the Lumberyard Game Engine is in fact the O3DE, or Open 3D Engine with details available on their new website here.
Details from the Lumberyard Blog on the O3GE release:
As we began building the successor to Lumberyard, we realized we could do more. If the ultimate goal is innovation, we want to enable the game and simulation developer community to work side by side with us, in an open community, so they could access the technology as well as contribute to it and grow it. That’s why the Linux Foundation has announced the Open 3D Foundation, with AWS seeding the foundation with the Open 3D Engine (O3DE). O3DE is a AAA-capable, cross-platform open source game engine. As part of an open source community, O3DE can expand 3D development for games and simulations by providing all the tools that developers need to bring their real-time 3D environments to life. This engine is available under an Apache 2.0 license, so anyone can build and retain their intellectual property, and choose to contribute back to the project.
We invested over a year to recruit partners with the right mix of resources, expertise, and above all, motivation to foster a self-sustaining community. We partnered with Linux Foundation as our trusted expert open-source organizational home because it stands as one of the best on the planet at managing large open-source projects. The Linux Foundation can provide the level of expert management demanded by such a large open-source effort. We are thrilled for the backing of a range of partners who feel just as strongly as we do about empowering choice for games and simulations developers. These partners include: Accelbyte, Adobe, Apocalypse Studios, Audiokinetic, Backtrace.io, Carbonated, Futurewei, GAMEPOCH, Genvid Technologies, Hadean, Huawei, HERE Technologies, Intel, International Game Developers Association, Kythera AI, Niantic, Open Robotics, PopcornFX, Red Hat, Rochester Institute of Technology, SideFX, Tafi, TLM Partners, and Wargaming. Partnership with an established open-source foundation also means creating a balanced ecosystem and drives mutual success. This flywheel consists of the open-source community’s direction and innovation, coupled with partners and project developers building the product. Ultimately, this collaboration drives newer innovations. This model continually focuses our efforts on the things customers expect from Amazon and AWS, including innovations like massive scale support, cloud rendering, a studio in the cloud, and many native features for the engine itself.
In this release we are going to see several of the features discussed in the 1.28 release announcement, including an all new Atom renderer, new networking libraries, improved math libraries and more.
The Open 3D Engine will not be fully released until the end of 2021, however developer previews are available here and the source code is now available on GitHub under the Apache 2 license. You can learn more about the end of Lumberyard and the birth of the Open 3D Engine (O3DE) in the video below.