Open 3D Engine (O3DE) and Me

I know at AWS have given the world a peek into our future (when we announced our new real-time 3D renderer Atom), but this is actually what I have been working on for the last 3 years.

Today we're announcing the Open 3D Engine (#o3de). It's a fully open-source AAA game engine licensed under the incredibly permissive Apache 2.0 license.

I have a love for things like procedural design and scaled production. These are technology improvements that are very important to innovation in games and the advancement of "Large Worlds" (like mega scale MMOs). 4.5 yrs ago, I joined Lumberyard because I saw how my ambitions and ideas could influence a product everyone in the world could have access to.

Since then, I have gotten my dirty fingerprints all over the place. I've worked closely with game studios and our internal dev teams to address several areas of interest, such as our 'Dynamic Vegetation' system which is a 'decorative object placement system' that helps game teams (like New World) design procedural biomes and place them easily across world of arbitrary size. We wanted to make the data flow for this system easier to use and visualize, so we followed that up with Landscape Canvas (a node graph tool for world data). I have a vision of 'Zero to Beautiful Accelerated' and 'Executing Quality at Scale', and to me these mean the engine/editor must be customizable, extensible, and can be automated, so I worked hard with my colleagues to design and implement a Python layer to the editor, as well as provide 'Qt For Python' (aka 'Pyside2') so developers and technical artists can more easily modify the editor and build their own tools and workflows.

When you start talking about and planning how to create a modern rendering engine from the ground up (trust me, it's a daunting task), it quickly becomes evident how many features touch rendering and how many systems it integrates with. This work has consumed me for several years. Within Lumberyard, while building and integrating the new rendering engine, we collectively took the opportunity to make improvements across the board. We designed a new material system, we made material data easier to work with, we wrote a transpile (cross-platform) shading language AZSL (don't worry, it's mostly HLSL). But we didn't just build the tech, we also wanted to improve the design of the editor in relation to the authoring experience, so we also pushed really hard there. We want our Creative Professional end users to love their tools, so we built a new Material Editor that is Look Development (#LookDev) oriented, with large visual previews focused on Physically Based Rendering (#PBR) workflows. We made several other decisions along the way, like supporting industry standards like the 'Academy Color Encoding System' (#ACES) that is also OpenColorIO (#OCIO) compliant (config 1.0.3). We also made a lot of improvements to other related areas, like the model and asset pipelines, and mesh/material workflows, the under-pinning goal being to reduce churn and improve iteration cycles.

There are so many other details and improvements I could talk all day about them, and this post would be too long, so I'll cut it short. The Lumberyard team is doing some amazing work and this version of the code base is a dramatically different beast.

The last thing I want to touch on, though, was our decision to dramatically alter how we license the engine. We wanted to open the engine up to increasing community involvement and free customers from any concerns around licensing constraints. Today we are announcing a fairly early developer preview to get this into developers' hands and grow the community. It's important for me to state: since this is a *developer* preview, don't expect to download the engine and start a new game production without some engineering investment (there are still many gaps). We want to get this release into people's hands as soon as possible, because we do want your input and feel that you can complete pre-production and pre-vis work or begin doing early game dev work.

We have a number of incredible partners joining the effort to work on some exciting new technologies. This release is to onboard our partners and interested community members, so that we can collaboratively push the engine to general release status. It is our hope that a few short months from now we'll be announcing the general release of the engine to the public.

?The newly formed Open 3D Foundation includes 25 partners including: 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.

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