Open 3D Foundation releases O3DE 24.09 in preview
The current Open 3D Engine sizzle reel. The upcoming version of the open-source game engine, O3DE 24.09, is now available in public preview.
The Open 3D Foundation has released a public preview of Open 3D Engine 24.09 (O3DE 24.09), the latest version of the open-source game engine.
The update introduces initial support for AR and VR games, and improves performance on mobile devices by “up to 400%”.
It is also now possible to create projects without the need to compile them, using only Script Canvas, O3DE’s visual programming system, and Lua scripting.
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 Linux-Foundation-backed Open 3D Foundation: a games counterpart to VFX technology body the Academy Software Foundation.
Although the latest sizzle reel (embedded above), is still heavy on AWS’s own projects, O3DE is starting to be used on commercial games, like Team Plutinite’s State of Matter.
O3DE 24.09: Initial support for AR, VR and ‘no code’ projects
Open 3D Engine 24.09 is the first update to the engine in close to a year, and is being pitched as a “huge milestone”.
At the time of writing, we can’t find any documentation for it on the O3DE website, so below, we’ve reproduced the feature summary from the O3DE newsletter:
- No Code projects: no need for a compiler for projects that only use Lua and Script Canvas
- Much improved mobile support: up to 400% performance improvements, many rendering quality improvements
- AR/VR support
- Up to 90% reduction in server headless mode memory usage
- Ability to scale features and adjust quality presets based on runtime device specifications
- Improved project exporting
- Improved ability to import models and objects from external sources
- Up to 90% improvement in Editor startup times
- Addressed several Linux installation and runtime issues
- Hundreds of bug fixes and quality of life improvements
Price and system requirements
Open 3D Engine 24.09 is available as compbiled binaries for Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 Linux. The source code is available under an Apache 2.0 licence.
Download the preview build of Open 3D Engine 24.09
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