The open source and completely free 3D game engine O3DE (Open 3D Engine), formerly known as Lumberyard, which is a fork of CryEngine sponsored by Amazon and several other big companies, has recently been updated. This update can be considered a huge step forward in making O3DE accessible to the masses. The developers are trying to make O3DE easier to get started.
Highlights of this update include:
- You can now create projects using Script Canvas and Lua without the need for a C++ compiler using the O3DE installer version.
- Numerous memory usage optimizations on mobile, AR/VR devices.
- Improved mobile performance – up to 400% improvement on iOS, Android, and AR/VR/XR devices.
- Split PhysX 4 and 5 into separate versions, allowing users to easily switch between PhysX versions even when using installer builds.
- Added project export UI with full export support for iOS, Android, Linux and Windows. Users no longer need to use the command line.
- Added capabilities to reduce headless server size by up to 90% depending on resources used.
- Added a dedicated rendering pipeline for mobile devices, allowing users to easily enable/disable features as needed.
- Added ability to control quality settings for each device. By default, there are 3 performance levels (low, medium, high) based on the device specifications for CPU, GPU and memory.
- Added shader options. When configured, this allows the renderer to automatically use the best performing shader for a given rendering need.
- Added object silhouette feature.
- Added a framework that allows users to interact with the LLM (AI model) of their choice.
- Network heartbeat packets are sent during high CPU load times to avoid network timeouts.
Details on several other improvements are available in the official changelog.