We hear from game and simulation developers that they want more choices that allow for collaboration, customization, and creative control in their pro

Built for Builders: The Story of AWS and Open 3D Engine

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2021-07-06 16:30:06

We hear from game and simulation developers that they want more choices that allow for collaboration, customization, and creative control in their production pipelines. Building 3D tooling from scratch can be cost prohibitive, take years to develop, and require significant resources to maintain. These developers end up choosing either to spend critical dollars reinventing the wheel, or to use proprietary solutions that can be difficult to customize.

To solve some of these challenges, we introduced the Lumberyard game engine in 2016. Lumberyard provided a completely free (no royalties or seat licenses), source-available, real-time 3D development engine that made it possible to build, deploy, and scale quickly with cloud integrations. Over the past 5 years, we continued evolving the product for our customers. We built a powerful component entity system and a popular Script Canvas visual scripting engine. We also acquired the Emotion FX animation editor, created a modular Gems system, and implemented many Twitch and AWS integrations. But one thing that never changed was our mission: making free, world class 3D rendering tools accessible to everyone . Now, we’re taking it one step further.

As we began building the successor to Lumberyard, we realized we could do more. If the ultimate goal is innovation, we want to enable the game and simulation developer community to work side by side with us, in an open community, so they could access the technology as well as contribute to it and grow it. That’s why the Linux Foundation has announced the Open 3D Foundation, with AWS seeding the foundation with the Open 3D Engine (O3DE). O3DE is a AAA-capable, cross-platform open source game engine. As part of an open source community, O3DE can expand 3D development for games and simulations by providing all the tools that developers need to bring their real-time 3D environments to life. This engine is available under an Apache 2.0 license, so anyone can build and retain their intellectual property, and choose to contribute back to the project.