O3DE, the open source game engine that started life as CryEngine, then Lumberyard and now open sourced as O3DE, just released a major update in the form of 22.10. This is the first update since 22.05 back in May and focuses on the exact areas where I believe O3DE needed the most effort, the onboarding experience and editor usability. That’s not to say there aren’t shiny new toys to play with in this release as well.
Details from the release notes:
- Onboarding and Collaboration: Remote projects, templates, and networked asset cache have made it easier to onboard and collaborate with other team members.
- Multiplayer: With improvements to the client-server connection, debugging, and network spawning, setting up multiplayer is more straightforward than before.
- Artist workflow: Improvements for artists include animation import, root motion extraction, and motion matching (experimental).
- Usability: We’ve made usability improvements to various features including Viewport Interaction (Viewport entity selection, Prefab edit mode), Gem Creation Wizard, Asset Browser, and hot reloading of assets.
- Terrain performance: The new O3DE Terrain system is in preview. For developers who have found O3DE best for working in smaller or more enclosed environments, now you can start working on larger-scale worlds with significant performance improvements for both editing and runtime/rendering. It can now handle 16km x 16km worlds and beyond at high framerates.
- New features: Sky Atmosphere and Stars components.
Key Links
The O3DE project is open source under the Apache 2 source license and is well supported by huge industry backers such as Intel, Microsoft, Adobe and even Epic Games. You can learn more about the O3DE 22.10 release and see it briefly in action in the video below.