Kythera AI at the heart of new Open 3D Engine

Today is one of those joyful days when we’re suddenly allowed to tell everyone about that awesome thing we’ve been working on in secret for ages.

A consortium of names from across the games and tech industries – including ourselves – have uncloaked and announced the release of a new open-source game engine, the Open 3D Engine. As a founder member of the Open 3D Foundation, we’re providing that engine’s AI toolset. It comes in the form of a binary add-on, the Kythera AI Gem.

Our partners in this Foundation include Amazon, the Linux Foundation, Intel, Popcorn FX, WWISE, Niantic, Wargaming, Carbonated and Apocalypse Studios. We’ve released the Open 3D Engine – O3DE for short – on an open-source model: anyone can download the engine’s source code, contribute to the project, and develop features and modifications. Open source is still relatively uncharted territory in the games sector, especially at the more commercial end, so a new open-source game engine has the potential to drive cultural change. We don’t yet know exactly what that change will look like, but we’re certainly keen to help shape it.

Kythera AI is Available to You

One immediate change will be in who is using our Kythera AI. Where previously our users have all been commercially licensed clients, now any game developer, at any level, will be able to start using Kythera AI for O3DE.

When you download O3DE, you’ll immediately have access to some of our core tools – intelligent 2D and 3D navigation, behavior trees, an advanced spline tool, and our sophisticated debugger and authoring suite, the Kythera AI Inspector. If you’ve been following our posts, you’ll know that there’s always more to Kythera. A list of Kythera AI features is available on our website, and our hardworking devs are continually improving and expanding them. As O3DE itself evolves, we’ll be making more of our tools available in the Kythera AI Gem – our intelligent formations and powerful spatial query system (SQS) are already on the roadmap. Full-source, AAA licenses, service & support packages and bespoke development all remain available to commercial clients – see our services and licensing pages.

We’ve provided a reference guide in the O3DE documentation, and included our new demo level “Kythera City” containing practical examples of our AI at work. You can open this level in O3DE and play with it straight away. Whoever you are, whatever your position in the industry, you can use Kythera AI!?

And it isn’t just for game developers. Although we’ve been calling it an open-source game engine, one of the exciting aspects of O3DE, and our AI Gem, is that they are applicable beyond the games industry. There are partners in the Foundation from a diverse range of disciplines. If you’re creating content for film, simulation, animation, or anything involving 3D modeling, the project can help you, and our AI feature set can help in all of these areas. We’re excited to see our tech applied in new ways, so please do get involved!?

Necessarily, we’ve been revamping our license agreements to suit new users. First off, under our new Community Licence, the Kythera AI for O3DE Gem will be free for non-commercial projects. If you want to use it in a project for your college course, or just to try out cool stuff, it’s totally free. For commercial projects, there’s a 60-day free trial period; after that, there is a licensing structure aimed at small studios and independent developers. This essentially allows you to use Kythera AI with no fees until you start making money above a certain threshold, at which point we collect royalties on your revenues above that threshold. There is also a buyout option you can use at any time. For the details, please read our EULA. As legal agreements in this industry go, it’s?surprisingly easy to follow.

Let’s make beautiful worlds full of intelligent life!

We’re looking forward to seeing what you can do with Kythera AI. We’ve designed our toolset to be versatile and scalable, to enable designers at all levels to be truly creative. But we’re not just making tools anymore; we’re fostering a community. Our forum is open to you as a place to discuss your exciting work and to help each other learn, and we’re looking forward to engaging with you there – you’ll be sent an invitation link when you download the Gem. This is a new journey for us as well as you, and we can’t wait to see where it goes.

For us, the most exciting thing about this is the sheer possibility. For the first time, we won’t know what projects our AI is being used for! But we know that indie devs come up with amazing ideas every day, and we’re proud that we’ll be able to help you turn those ideas into great projects. We’d love to hear your feedback and to collaborate with you - so please get involved in the conversation. It’ll be great to see you there.

You can download the engine at the O3DE website, and read the Kythera AI Gem documentation to get started. We’re eager to see what you create!