Maybe you heard some buzz about the open source project O3DE and this probably left you with a few unanswered questions. Well, look no further.
What Exactly is O3DE?
O3DE is a multi-platform 3D development engine that brings together both integrated and external 3D tools like Maya, Blender, ZBrush, and countless others. This enables developers to build Triple-A (AAA) games, cinema quality 3D worlds for video production and high quality fidelity simulations.
O3DE is an Apache 2.0 licensed multi-platform 3D engine originally developed by AWS as the fully open source successor to Amazon Lumberyard. Perhaps the most incredible benefit of using O3DE is that user pays zero licensing fees.
Open 3D Engine (O3DE) 21.11
The Linux Foundation welcomed the Open 3D Foundation into its community of families in July of 2021. The first project in the foundation was the Open 3D Engine known as O3DE.
Since its inception, it has raised $2.7 million in commitments from 26 partners in over two years. It has received signed commitments from a range of big companies such as Adobe, Intel, AWS, Niantic, Huawei, SideFX, and others.
Yesterday, the Open 3D Foundation (O3DF) announced the O3DE Stable 21.11 release of the Apache 2.0-licensed Open 3D Engine project.
With the first major release of the engine, developers and content creators can get started faster and have confidence that the core components of the engine are stable and supported.
Royal OโBrien, GM of Digital Media and Games for the Linux Foundation
Thereโs now a binary installer for Windows for Open 3D Engine. In other words, now you can try out these creative tools without building from source every time.
On the Linux side, Open 3D Engine is now considered to be available in preview. So donโt expect to have support for everything you need quite yet.
At the moment, Open 3D Engine only have official support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) as a pre-built binary Debian package. Other Linux systems which meet the hardware and software requirements are considered experimental and may need modifications to successfully run Open 3D Engine.
To get started with O3DE on Linux, you can check out the official Linux install documentation.
In conclusion, we think that O3DE is a great project and we hope it gets widely adopted. While the Godot people are doing a great job, it will be nice to have a more advanced and professional free 3D engine, being actively developed by many organizations.
