Open 3D Foundation Announces Newest Open 3D Engine Release and First-Ever O3DE Jam

O3DE 23.05 levels up the authoring experience for game creators and robotic simulation developers; first-ever O3DE Jam invites artists to bring their 3D visions to life

SAN FRANCISCO – The Open 3D Foundation (O3DF), home of a vibrant, diverse community focused on building a first-class, open source engine for real-time 3D development, has released 23.05, the latest version of the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), bringing enhanced usability and stability improvements, as well as new capabilities, for developing games, robotic simulations and other 3D applications alike. O3DF is also announcing the first-ever O3DE Jam, taking place virtually this weekend, May 5-7, 2023. 

With more than 5,915 code commits and 3,114,400 lines changed, this new release represents deep open source contributions and offers several improvements aiming to make it easier for developers, artists and content creators to build 3D simulations for AAA games, robotics simulations and various other 3D applications across AI, metaverse, digital twin, automotive, healthcare, and more. 

An Enhanced Authoring Experience for Game and Robotics Simulation Development

In addition to several enhancements to the core engine, the O3DE 23.05 release introduces significant support to level up the authoring experience for game creators and robotics simulation developers. 

With support for up to 10 players, the new Multiplayer Sample Game (MPS) equips game developers with client and dedicated server reference implementations of common game elements to help jumpstart new projects. It delivers key examples of integrations with major O3DE systems, including terrain, lighting, multiplayer, audio, scripting and VFX, among others. This game demonstrates O3DE’s ability to deliver compelling, feature-rich games while providing significant opportunities for the O3DE community to expand and contribute to the game.

Robotics simulation developers can also now benefit from O3DE’s integration with the Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 using the ROS2 Gem, which provides developer tools, components and assets to build robotics simulations with O3DE. Previously introduced as an early access version, this gem has been released with significant improvements, including increased stability, comprehensive documentation and new features, from an importer, project templates and additional sensors to multi-camera and physics enhancements.

"With O3DE, you can actually write ROS 2 code inside your simulation project. We made use of the fact that O3DE is C++ based so it is quite easy to have a direct integration with ROS 2,” said Adam Dabrowski, VP of Robotics and Simulation at Robotec.ai.

Increased Usability and Performance for a Diversity of 3D Applications

With this latest release, the core engine becomes even easier for 3D developers to wield across an array of applications. Material Canvas, a new, intuitive visual scripting interface, combines the powerful, familiar capabilities of Script Canvas and the Material Editor, allowing users to create generative materials and custom shaders. The Material Pipeline enables easier customization to balance the performance and quality of the render pipeline, while the Asset Browser provides users with multiple layout options, file operations, and an asset inspector panel with other operations to manage assets.

O3DE gets a performance boost with this release. Additional new features include:

• Physics: In addition to improvements in multiple PhysX authoring workflows, users can enable support for PhysX 5.1 with a simple flag in O3DE, which shows a 15% increase in simulation performance compared with PhysX 4. Testing is underway to ensure full support, and we encourage community contributions to accelerate this support.
• Animations: In addition to a more consistent Animation Editor experience and a more robust, streamlined Animation Asset Import process, the Animation Editor AnimGraph now has a Performance Visualizer to help users profile and optimize their AnimGraphs.
• Terrain System: A new paintbrush tool enables users to paint inside the viewport to create or modify terrain, while a new Terrain Developer Guide aids developers in using and extending the terrain system.
• VR/XR and Mobile Support: New OpenXR and OpenXRVk Gems deliver support for OpenXR-compatible devices, such as Meta Quest 2, including stereoscopic rendering, while the addition of half-float support for the Atom renderer improves the performance on mobile devices.

“The O3DE community is addressing today’s demands with the latest release helping improve work flows and performance for robotics simulation developers and game creators, delivering industry-leading features when they need them and accelerating their work,” said Royal O’Brien, General Manager of Digital Media and Games at the Linux Foundation & Executive Director of the Open 3D Foundation. “The introduction of the O3DE Jam allows everyone to take these new features and create whatever is in their minds’ eye. We are continuing to make strides that will help ensure easy accessibility for anyone ready to build and experiment with this powerful engine.” 

Open 3D Engine releases occur on a bi-annual cadence, in the spring and the fall. The next release is scheduled for October 2023.

To learn more about this release and all of its features, read the release notes, or join the community on Discord. You can download the 22.03 release today. 

First-Ever O3DE Jam: May 5-7, 2023 Virtual

The Open 3D Foundation is hosting the first-ever O3DE Jam this weekend. Developers are invited to bring their 3D visions to life while learning more about O3DE and competing for open source cred, visibility and free IGDA membership. To learn more, please visit: https://itch.io/jam/o3de-jam

About the Open 3D Engine Project

Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is the flagship project managed by the Open 3D Foundation (O3DF). The open source project is a modular, cross-platform 3D engine built to power anything from AAA games to cinema-quality 3D worlds to high-fidelity simulations. The code is hosted on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. To learn more, please visit o3de.org. To get involved and connect with the O3DE community, please join us on Discord and GitHub.

About the Open 3D Foundation

Established in July 2021, the mission of the Open 3D Foundation (O3DF) is to make an open-source, fully-featured, high-fidelity, real-time 3D engine for building games and simulations, available to every industry. The Open 3D Foundation is home to the O3D Engine project. To learn more, please visit o3d.foundation.