6 ms·

Open 3D Foundation announces first major release of Open 3D Engine

106 points by marcodiego 5y ago

thrower123 5y ago
Amazon did finally release New World this fall, so that brings the grand total of released games built with Lumberyard to... three.
kelsolaar 5y ago
How does it compare with Unreal Engine or Unity?
- laputan_machine 5y ago
  Godot is the open-source equivalent, and for 2D is absolutely the best engine I've used out of the UE, Unity and Godot. 3D is having big improvements coming in 4.0. Worth checking out: https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/ https://github.com/godotengine/godot https://github.com/godotengine/godot
  - detaro 5y ago
    "the open-source equivalent" to what? How does this answer the question it responds to?
fulafel 5y ago
What are some properties of this that differentiate it from other open source 3D engines (or closed ones)? Platform and language support support also seems absent from web site or GitHub readme.
- peachy_no_pie 5y ago
  I'm wondering the same, particularly how it compares to Blender and Houdini.
mboerwink 5y ago
It seemed very strange. Many big partners, but social media accounts less than a year old. Turns out, it is the evolution/opensourcing of AWS Lumberyard. Wikipedia cites <https://venturebeat.com/2021/07/06/amazons-lumberyard-becomes-an-open-source-3d-game-engine-with-support-from-20-companies/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/07/06/amazons-lumberyard-become...>
wokwokwok 5y ago
> 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. > ...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. ie. This is lumberyard, which is "Amazon Lumberyard is a now superseded freeware cross-platform game engine developed by Amazon and based on CryEngine (initially released in 2002), ..." https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/open-3d-engine/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/open-3d-engine/ ...but, love it or not, the source is Apache 2.0 (https://github.com/o3de/o3de https://github.com/o3de/o3de), so there's sure to be some stuff you can grab there to use in other things.
slimsag 5y ago
I would encourage anyone looking for an open source game engine to first consider Godot, Ogre3D, Panda3D, etc. Rebranded as "Open 3D" and backed by the linux foundation, O3DE appears to be little more than an open sourced version of Amazon's Lumberyard (which was itself just a purchased copy of CryEngine.) Ultimately this came from the same Amazon that had this clause in employment contracts of people NOT working in game-related parts of Amazon: > "I grant to Amazon a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferrable license to any and all of my intellectual property rights associated with the Personal Game and my Personal Game development." From the same Amazon Game Studios that has failed to release several titles with YEARS of development in them including: Breakaway, Crucible, Lord of the Rings MMO, Intensity, Nova, etc. The same Amazon Game Studios whose "New World" MMO had health and gold client-side, allowed inserting arbitrary HTML+JS code into the game chat that would run on other's computers, could kick players from the game, etc. I don't doubt that this is open source by definition. I don't doubt that the Linux Foundation has allowed this project to live under its umbrella. But the way this came about is a far cry from being in the spirit of open source in my opinion, and rebranding it as "Open 3D" seems just a brilliant marketing trick. In the best case scenario, Amazon's intentions are to convince the FOSS community to develop their engine to subsidize costs long-term while maintaining ownership of the project broadly, and having full control/ownership of the new "Open3D Foundation" that they can use readily for marketing[0] similar how they do to the Rust foundation[1] to hire talent. It might not be the worst thing in the world, but seriously, just use any of the other open source engines out there. Godot is great. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/open-3d-engine/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/open-3d-engine/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513130
- spijdar 5y ago
  I'm no game developer, but I think if nothing else, Cryengine/lumberyard/open 3D would be far superior in terms of visuals than the alternatives. I'd assume the code as a whole is clunkier and more bloated, but also more "battle hardened" than most FOSS projects too. Godot's 3D support seems promising, but at a very different level than the "big" engines. Not sure I'd want to pick it up for a serious project just yet. The other options like Ogre seem ... kind of bad, if their industry track record is to go by. Ogre in particular seems to have had a brief golden era, where a few commercial games used it, but in every case I know of, sequels to those games abandoned Ogre for unity or unreal. Even the open source games/frameworks I know of that used it like OpenMW abandoned it. If I was really trying to make a commercial indie game with a FOSS engine, this seems like a good candidate, even considering the questionable Amazon ties... to me, it strikes me as more "open source Cryengine" in the first place anyway, in the same way OpenSolaris indirectly open sourced a lot of older UNIX utilities in addition to Sun's novel code. (Of course if I was only making a hobby project I'd probably stick to Godot, but I'm imagining the perspective of a small team seriously trying to make a commercial game)
hooby 5y ago
It would seem, that Amazon "donated" the Lumberyard/CryTec Engine to the Open 3D foundation, which is a newly created subsidiary of the Linux foundation. It's available under very permissive licenses - Apache 2.0 or MIT, whichever you prefer - no strings attached. With Amazon being just one of 20 different founding members, and under the stewardship of the Linux foundation, it might just be, that this project is sufficiently independent from AWS now, to stand on it's own. Does anyone know if the foundation does grant any special "founding member" rights to AWS? Could AWS theoretically still pull some crazy stuff, like Microsoft recently did with the .NET foundation?
- moonchrome 5y ago
  >Does anyone know if the foundation does grant any special "founding member" rights to AWS? Could AWS theoretically still pull some crazy stuff, like Microsoft recently did with the .NET foundation? Why does it matter ? It's Apache 2.0, they can't pin you for using it on patents or copyright. For a 3D engine it should be more realistic to fork if you don't agree with the direction.
- slimsag 5y ago
  Despite ~20 members in the Open3D Foundation, it's nearly impossible to find any impactful contributor that is not an Amazon employee[0] [0] https://github.com/o3de/o3de/graphs/contributors https://github.com/o3de/o3de/graphs/contributors
  - hooby 5y ago
    That does not seem particularly unusual to me? This is a piece of formerly proprietary software, that is now being made open source. So of course almost all contributors would be employees of the former owner of the proprietary version of the software. Just like for example Doom was still 100% made by id software, at the moment of it becoming open source. How this evolves/develops remains to be seen, of course. But as of right now, I'd say that's to be expected.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  > Could AWS theoretically still pull some crazy stuff They could but they won't. In my experience Amazon doesn't care about anything except wanting people to use their infrastructure. While they haven't shown Google levels of goodwill towards OSS they also have never shown MS levels of contempt.
detaro 5y ago
discussion when it was originally announced 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27751358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27751358

106 points by marcodiego 5y ago

Amazon did finally release New World this fall, so that brings the grand total of released games built with Lumberyard to... three.

kelsolaar 5y ago

How does it compare with Unreal Engine or Unity?

laputan_machine 5y ago
Godot is the open-source equivalent, and for 2D is absolutely the best engine I've used out of the UE, Unity and Godot. 3D is having big improvements coming in 4.0. Worth checking out: https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/ https://github.com/godotengine/godot https://github.com/godotengine/godot
- detaro 5y ago
  "the open-source equivalent" to what? How does this answer the question it responds to?

fulafel 5y ago

What are some properties of this that differentiate it from other open source 3D engines (or closed ones)? Platform and language support support also seems absent from web site or GitHub readme.

peachy_no_pie 5y ago
I'm wondering the same, particularly how it compares to Blender and Houdini.

mboerwink 5y ago

It seemed very strange. Many big partners, but social media accounts less than a year old. Turns out, it is the evolution/opensourcing of AWS Lumberyard. Wikipedia cites <https://venturebeat.com/2021/07/06/amazons-lumberyard-becomes-an-open-source-3d-game-engine-with-support-from-20-companies/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/07/06/amazons-lumberyard-become...>

wokwokwok 5y ago

> 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. > ...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. ie. This is lumberyard, which is "Amazon Lumberyard is a now superseded freeware cross-platform game engine developed by Amazon and based on CryEngine (initially released in 2002), ..." https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/open-3d-engine/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/open-3d-engine/ ...but, love it or not, the source is Apache 2.0 (https://github.com/o3de/o3de https://github.com/o3de/o3de), so there's sure to be some stuff you can grab there to use in other things.

slimsag 5y ago

I would encourage anyone looking for an open source game engine to first consider Godot, Ogre3D, Panda3D, etc. Rebranded as "Open 3D" and backed by the linux foundation, O3DE appears to be little more than an open sourced version of Amazon's Lumberyard (which was itself just a purchased copy of CryEngine.) Ultimately this came from the same Amazon that had this clause in employment contracts of people NOT working in game-related parts of Amazon: > "I grant to Amazon a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferrable license to any and all of my intellectual property rights associated with the Personal Game and my Personal Game development." From the same Amazon Game Studios that has failed to release several titles with YEARS of development in them including: Breakaway, Crucible, Lord of the Rings MMO, Intensity, Nova, etc. The same Amazon Game Studios whose "New World" MMO had health and gold client-side, allowed inserting arbitrary HTML+JS code into the game chat that would run on other's computers, could kick players from the game, etc. I don't doubt that this is open source by definition. I don't doubt that the Linux Foundation has allowed this project to live under its umbrella. But the way this came about is a far cry from being in the spirit of open source in my opinion, and rebranding it as "Open 3D" seems just a brilliant marketing trick. In the best case scenario, Amazon's intentions are to convince the FOSS community to develop their engine to subsidize costs long-term while maintaining ownership of the project broadly, and having full control/ownership of the new "Open3D Foundation" that they can use readily for marketing[0] similar how they do to the Rust foundation[1] to hire talent. It might not be the worst thing in the world, but seriously, just use any of the other open source engines out there. Godot is great. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/open-3d-engine/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/open-3d-engine/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513130

spijdar 5y ago
I'm no game developer, but I think if nothing else, Cryengine/lumberyard/open 3D would be far superior in terms of visuals than the alternatives. I'd assume the code as a whole is clunkier and more bloated, but also more "battle hardened" than most FOSS projects too. Godot's 3D support seems promising, but at a very different level than the "big" engines. Not sure I'd want to pick it up for a serious project just yet. The other options like Ogre seem ... kind of bad, if their industry track record is to go by. Ogre in particular seems to have had a brief golden era, where a few commercial games used it, but in every case I know of, sequels to those games abandoned Ogre for unity or unreal. Even the open source games/frameworks I know of that used it like OpenMW abandoned it. If I was really trying to make a commercial indie game with a FOSS engine, this seems like a good candidate, even considering the questionable Amazon ties... to me, it strikes me as more "open source Cryengine" in the first place anyway, in the same way OpenSolaris indirectly open sourced a lot of older UNIX utilities in addition to Sun's novel code. (Of course if I was only making a hobby project I'd probably stick to Godot, but I'm imagining the perspective of a small team seriously trying to make a commercial game)

hooby 5y ago

It would seem, that Amazon "donated" the Lumberyard/CryTec Engine to the Open 3D foundation, which is a newly created subsidiary of the Linux foundation. It's available under very permissive licenses - Apache 2.0 or MIT, whichever you prefer - no strings attached. With Amazon being just one of 20 different founding members, and under the stewardship of the Linux foundation, it might just be, that this project is sufficiently independent from AWS now, to stand on it's own. Does anyone know if the foundation does grant any special "founding member" rights to AWS? Could AWS theoretically still pull some crazy stuff, like Microsoft recently did with the .NET foundation?

moonchrome 5y ago
>Does anyone know if the foundation does grant any special "founding member" rights to AWS? Could AWS theoretically still pull some crazy stuff, like Microsoft recently did with the .NET foundation? Why does it matter ? It's Apache 2.0, they can't pin you for using it on patents or copyright. For a 3D engine it should be more realistic to fork if you don't agree with the direction.
slimsag 5y ago
Despite ~20 members in the Open3D Foundation, it's nearly impossible to find any impactful contributor that is not an Amazon employee[0] [0] https://github.com/o3de/o3de/graphs/contributors https://github.com/o3de/o3de/graphs/contributors
- hooby 5y ago
  That does not seem particularly unusual to me? This is a piece of formerly proprietary software, that is now being made open source. So of course almost all contributors would be employees of the former owner of the proprietary version of the software. Just like for example Doom was still 100% made by id software, at the moment of it becoming open source. How this evolves/develops remains to be seen, of course. But as of right now, I'd say that's to be expected.
Mikeb85 5y ago
> Could AWS theoretically still pull some crazy stuff They could but they won't. In my experience Amazon doesn't care about anything except wanting people to use their infrastructure. While they haven't shown Google levels of goodwill towards OSS they also have never shown MS levels of contempt.

detaro 5y ago

discussion when it was originally announced 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27751358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27751358