Amazon decided to significantly upgrade its Lumberyard technology and turned it into an open source engine. It is called Open 3D Engine and is suitable for creating cross-platform AAA games. The developers note that there will be dozens of different tools in the new modular engine.Lumberyard was originally based on the CryEngine engine, which Amazon licensed from Crytek in 2015.
According to the company, it has not just updated the technology, but completely redesigned many of its elements.
The main innovation is modularity. Now each part of the Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is a separate customizable library. In total, the new engine has over 30 tools. You can combine them in various ways or add your own development tools.
Another important change was The Atom Render technology. It is a multithreaded rendering tool that fully supports rateracing on Vulkan, Metal and DirectX 12.
“We believe that creating a first-class open source solution focused on the community will be a revolution in the field of 3D development. This is what Linux once did for operating systems, and Apache did for the web,“ said Bill Vass, vice president of development at Amazon Web Services.
The Open 3D Engine is essentially an SDK. Now developers do not need to compile libraries again after making changes to the project. It also simplifies the customization of the engine, allowing you to replace almost any components in it.
Amazon has also improved performance, working with light and data, and added support for new “cloud” capabilities. The company hopes that in the future the Open 3D Engine will be used to create games for PC, consoles and mobile devices.
O3DE was developed as part of the creation of the Open 3D Foundation. This is an initiative of The Linux Foundation, which aims to support open source projects. Among the partners of the association are Amazon Web Services, Adobe, Huawei, Intel, Niantic, Wargaming, Accelbyte and many other companies.
Now Open 3D Engine is available as part of the preview for developers. The full release of the engine will take place at the end of 2021.