Epic Games, the makers of Unreal Engine and the Epic Game Store, have just joined the open source O3DE game engine development foundation, the Open 3D Foundation as a premier member. O3DE is an open source 3D game engine, originally developed by Amazon as the Lumberyard engine, which itself is a fork of Crytek’s CryEngine.
Details of Epic Games joining the foundation:
Epic Games, developer of Unreal Engine, joins the O3DF as a Premier member to further interoperability and portability of assets, visuals and media scripting, enabling artists and content creators around the globe to unleash their creativity and innovation by removing barriers in their choice of tools. Marc Petit, VP of Unreal Engine Ecosystem at Epic Games, will join the O3DF’s Governing Board. In this role, he will share what Epic has learned over 30 years in the industry to help shape the Foundation’s strategic direction and curation of 3D visualization and simulation projects.
“The metaverse will require companies to work together to advance open standards and open source tools, and we believe the Open 3D Foundation will play an important role in this journey,” said Petit. “With shared standards for interoperability, we’re giving creators more freedom and flexibility to build interactive 3D content using the tools they’re most comfortable with, and to bring those amazing experiences to life in Unreal Engine and across other 3D engines.”
This move builds on Epic Games’ steadfast commitment in delivering choice to content producers to unleash their creativity. In addition to enabling them to move media seamlessly between development environments, the Open 3D Engine allows artists and developers to consume only what they need, with the ability to customize components based on their unique requirements.
This is not the first time Epic Games have supported a competing open source game engine, as they supported the Godot project with a generous MegaGrant in 2020. It is interesting that Unreal Engine developers will be on the board that sets development priorities of O3DE and it will be exciting to see which, if any, technologies become shared between the engines.
Key Links
You can learn more about Epic Games joining the O3DE development foundation in the video below.