O3DE, the open source game engine derived from Amazon’s Lumberyard just released version 23.05. The first major release of 2023 and one of only two scheduled releases, it is packed with fixes, features and changes. Additionally the just launched a large multiplayer demonstration project with source code and assets hosted on GitHub.
Highlight features of the O3DE 23.05 release include:
- Material Canvas is a new intuitive, easy to use, node based, visual scripting interface that allows users to create new, custom shaders and materials. It is built upon the familiar foundations of Script Canvas and Material Editor. For more information, refer to sig-graphics-audio#51 .
- O3DE now has a Material Pipeline, a layer of abstraction between lighting and materials which utilizes new builders and new features from the asset system to build unique shaders for each render pipeline. This provides modularity and extensibility to the Atom Renderer, allowing easier customization of the render pipeline.
- O3DE Editor extensibility is improved with the introduction of a new Action Manager API that allows adding menus, hotkeys, and, contextual actions from Gems and Python scripts.
- PhysX 5.1 is supported and multiple PhysX authoring workflows have been improved.
- The updated Animation Editor experience is now more consistent with other O3DE tools. The Animation Asset Import process is now more robust and straightforward, and the Animation Editor AnimGraph now has a performance visualizer to help users profile and optimize their AnimGraphs.
- The Terrain System now provides users a paintbrush tool so they may paint inside the viewport to create or modify terrain.
- The new Multiplayer Sample Game (MPS) Gem provides a sample networked multiplayer game project. The o3de-multiplayersample repository is home to O3DE’s newest project, a networked, player versus player versus environment game that supports 1 to 10 players. The game delivers significant examples of integrations with major O3DE systems including: terrain, sky/atmosphere/stars, lighting, multiplayer, audio, scripting and VFX. Additionally, the game makes extensive use of the Atom Renderer’s advanced feature set including global illumination, cascade shadows, emissive surfaces, bounce lighting, temporal anti-aliasing and hybrid reflections (screen space & ray tracing) amongst others to achieve its visual goals.MPS also delivers a rich set of open source assets for use outside of the game. This project demonstrates O3DE’s ability to deliver a compelling, feature rich game, while providing significant opportunities for the O3DE community to expand and contribute to the game. MPS utilizes all of O3DE’s key systems, flushing out bugs and expanding feature sets, so that everything works better together at a scale and visual polish beyond existing sample games.For more information, refer to the Multiplayer Sample Project README .
- A new Asset Browser experience provides multiple layout options, file operations, an asset inspector panel, and other operations for asset management.
- O3DE version support has been improved. Multiple O3DE versions can be installed on the same drive, and projects are linked to the O3DE version they were created and last used with.
- Gem platform compatibility can be specified for each Gem. The Gem Catalog can now be filtered by platform compatibility.
- OpenXR Support for stereoscopic rendering has been added.
- Mobile device performance has been improved with the addition of half-float support for Atom.
Key Links
You can learn more about the O3DE release and see the new multiplayer sample in action in the video below.