Open 3D Foundation releases O3DE 2026.5
The Open 3D Foundation has released Open 3D Engine 26.05 (O3DE 26.05), the latest version of the open-source game engine.
The release adds an experimental new native particle system, support for AgX and Khronos PBR Neutral tonemapping, and automatic LOD generation.
An open-source 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 now defunct 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.
New native multithreaded particle system
The main new feature in O3DE 26.05 is the Open Particle System.
The new Gem makes it possible to author particle-based effects natively in O3DE, rather than using the third-party Popcorn FX O3DE Gem.
It includes a dedicated editor for authoring and previewing particle systems, and a simulation runtime integrated with the Atom renderer.
The system supports three particle types – sprite, ribbon and mesh – with users to control emission shapes and rates, and changes to the size, color and velocity of particles over time.
Particles can be affected by forces including collision, drag and vorticity.
The Open 3D Foundation is terrible at generating imagery for new features, but you can see the particle system in action at 06:30 in this Games from Scratch video.
Updates to tonemapping, LOD generation and the physical sky
Other new artist features in O3DE 23.05 include support for AgX and Khronos PBR Neutral tonemapping in the Display Mapper component.
O3DE can now also automatically generate missing LODs when importing assets in FBX format.
The physically based sky system, previously part of the core rendering gems, has now been moved to a dedicated Sky Atmosphere gem, to reduce the size of projects that don’t need it.
New developer features and deprecated technologies
Developers get a new graphical tool for developing C++ components, rather than having to do so from the command line; and a bundled version of CMake is now used by default for building code.
Engine stability has been improved with “hundreds” of patches to reported issues.
In addition, PhysX 4, the old version of the open-source physics engine, is deprecated and is due to be removed in the next update. PhysX 5 is now used by default in O3DE projects.
Licensing and system requirements
Open 3D Engine 26.05 is available as compiled binaries for Windows 10+ and Ubuntu 22.04 Linux. The source code is available under an Apache 2.0 licence.
Read a full list of new features in O3DE 26.05 in the online changelog
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