Newest Open 3D Engine Release Introduces Industry-First Automations, Accelerates Work for Robotics and Game Developers

Recent developments across the industry to change licenses and increase fees for developers leads to new interest in the open source engine, which offers industry-first automations and tightest integration with Robotics Operating System

The Open 3D Foundation (O3DF), home of a vibrant, diverse community focused on building a first-class, open source engine for real-time 3D development, today announced the release of 23.10, the latest version of the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), bringing new usability and performance improvements and capabilities for developing high-fidelity robotics simulations and games. O3DE 23.10 also offers new support for ARM64 on Linux, significantly reducing costs for developers.

The latest release represents high-impact contributions and offers several improvements aiming to make it easier for developers, artists and content creators to build 3D simulations for AAA games, robotics simulations and various other 3D applications across AI, metaverse, digital twin, automotive, healthcare and more. New features, particularly those for robotics simulations and new automations that accelerate developer work, will be on display at ROSCon on October 18-22, 2023 in New Orleans. Details about O3DE's ROSCon session and activities can be read in its recent blog.

O3DE offers tightest ROS2 integration in the industry, many new improvements and features focus on robotics simulations

By virtue of the engine's modularity, developers can customize it for specific applications and use cases, including robotics. Robotics developers have significantly diverse feature set requirements and implementation trade-offs, and O3DE's direct integration with the Robot Operating System (ROS), which doesn't require bridges nor wrappers, enables ROS developers to address these varied requirements while streamlining development. This latest release brings additional enhancements for robotics developers, including redesigned manipulation components, so users can employ what they want without the need to manage the entire system. This release adds finger grippers and vacuum grippers and a significantly improved robot import feature that supports SD and RDF formats. It also includes greater performance for camera and LiDAR sensors. O3DE's modularity makes it possible for developers to enable different aspects of the engine as needed, such as a new contact sensor, or the ability to add their own sensors.

"O3DE has what I consider to be the best kind of ROS integration, in the sense that we write ROS2 code in the simulator," said Adam Dąbrowski, VP of Robotics and Simulations at Robotec.ai. "So, we can use all the packages directly without any bridges, which has a tremendous impact on performance and enables us to communicate directly to the ROS ecosystem and record data efficiently." 

New, Industry-First Automations Accelerate and Simplify Authoring Experience

In addition to several improvements to the core engine, the O3DE 23.10 release continues to level up the authoring experience for robotics simulation developers and game creators with significant new enhancements.

It includes the industry's first automations to create object repos, which allows users to build an object (a car or house, for example) and use prefab overrides to change colors and other details without having to create a new object. Other new automations include script canvas for small graph nodes to handle simple arithmetic operations. The document property editor allows tools creators to use data to create their UX rather than having to write the code or understand QT and filtering. The community has also added automation improvements for installation, allowing content creators to easily and quickly publish their content without the command line.

Additional Features in O3DE 23.10 include:

• Improved ability to export projects from O3DE in Windows, Linux, Linux Server and iOS. Users can now distribute via command to package everything up and distribute to whomever they want without O3DE on their computer.
• Build fixes for all platforms, including Windows, Linux and iOS
• A variety of visual and performance improvements to the rendering system.
  • Better memory support: Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA) support and DirectX Memory Allocator (DX12MA)
  • Mesh instancing
  • Mobile shader performance improvement
  • Framework for multi-GPU support
  • Addition of raytraced reflections
• Important updates for debugging networking, minor performance improvements.

Open 3D Engine releases occur on a bi-annual cadence, in the spring and the fall. The next release is scheduled for April or May 2024.

To learn more about this release and all of its features, read the release notes, or join the community on Discord. You can download the 23.10 release today. O3DE is also introducing virtual meetups, called Open 3D Connect. The first meetup is Wed, Oct 11, 2023 at 11 am PDT.  For  more information and to join, please visit: https://o3de.org/open-3d-connect/

Project Eureka Updates

Project Eureka, an academic collaboration with the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) that is underwriting a team of students and faculty to build a commercial game using the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), was announced earlier this year and the student team is hard at work, driving to deliver the final binary with all assets by New Year's Eve, December 31, 2023.

The team ported their game, State of Matter, from Unity to O3DE within the first month of the project, and since then have been building out the levels of the game. They recently reported on their progress at the Rochester Game Festival and will do the same at the upcoming Brick City Weekend on October 14 and RIT MAGIC Center's Playtest during the 2nd week of November.

To follow along with the team's progress, please visit: https://o3de.org/project-eureka/  

About the Open 3D Engine Project

Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is the flagship project managed by the Open 3D Foundation (O3DF). The open source project is a modular, cross-platform 3D engine built to power anything from AAA games to cinema-quality 3D worlds to high-fidelity simulations. The code is hosted on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. To learn more, please visit o3de.org. To get involved and connect with the O3DE community, please join us on Discord and GitHub.

About the Open 3D Foundation

Established in July 2021, the mission of the Open 3D Foundation (O3DF) is to make an open-source, fully-featured, high-fidelity, real-time 3D engine for building games and simulations, available to every industry. The Open 3D Foundation is home to the O3D Engine project. To learn more, please visit o3d.foundation.