Open 3D Engine, or O3DE for short, is a state of the art open source game dev engine. Its Foundation, O3DF in cooperation with the Rochester Institute of Technology, announced the funding of a team of students who will build a commercial game with 03DE, in an attempt to shape the game development landscape of the future.

There's life beyond Unity after all. We examined that proposition in Stride3D - Life beyond Unity? by introducing the Stride3D game engine as a valuable replacement of Unity.

There is, it seems, no shortage of open source quality games engines, and O3DE is one of them.

O3DE is a full-featured, real-time open source 3D engine, that can be used to create high-fidelity games and simulations.

At a high level, its selling points are:

• High Fidelity
  You can build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds, and  simulations.
• Cross Platform
  Can craft 3D solutions for diverse use cases across a variety of platforms, including mobile and AR / VR / XR.
• Cloud Friendly
  Extends the functionality of your 3D creations through easy integration with your favorite cloud services.
• Open Source
  Its source code is available without any fees or commercial obligations under Apache 2.0, hosted on GitHub.
• Community Driven
  It has got a thriving community where you can seek help to get fast answers as well as learn how to drive the adoption of new capabilities.

On top of that, there's more than 25 member organizations across the globe that support O3DE. That list includes names such as AWS, Open Robotics, PopcornFX and Red Hat.

For developers the following features are important:

• Modular
  Consume only what you need and easily customize components using Gems.
• Core Modules
  Supplied by the O3DE software development kit (SDK), provide math, memory management, serialization, event messaging, and more.
• Authoring Tools
  Editors and related applications for placing objects in a level, adding components, and scripting logic.
• Interoperable
  Build using preferred tools with seamless asset portability across dev environments.
• Submodules (Gems)
  Used to add features and functionality, from materials, textures, and models, to scripting editors, to entire runtime systems such as the Atom renderer, AI, and physics.
• Asset Pipeline Tools
  For converting, optimizing, and bundling assets.
• Build system
  To build and package a shippable launcher.
• Flexible Runtime Scripting
  O3DE is written primarily in C++ as such your project's code will be written in that, but you can use scripting languages too. In O3DE, you have two scripting environments available for creating runtime logic: a visual scripting tool called Script Canvas, and a more traditional scripting model, Lua.

and so on.

I would also add to that, the great documentation the project has got, something very important for any open source software to gain wide adoption.

No wonder that the Open 3D Foundation wants to establish this high fidelity game engine as the engine of choice for the next generation of artists, developers and builders.

To do that it has just announced Project Eureka, a first-of-its-kind academic collaboration with Rochester Institute of Technology, that will fund a team of students to build a commercial game using O3DE. The students competed for this opportunity and will significantly enhance their portfolios, learn from industry experts and hone their game development skills in an applied setting.

The 2023 Project Eureka team includes:

• Jack Kalina: Project Management/ProgrammingStudent
• Kenny Rossi: Level Design/Creative Lead
• Tyler Lynch: Programming
• AJ Biswas: Programming/Music
• Liam Alexiou: 3D Modeling
• Aidan Roberts: Programming/Audio

Work is underway now with a full summer of O3DE game development in store for the Project Eureka team. The proof of concept vertical slice with limited assets is due July 1, 2023, followed by alpha playable binaries throughout the summer and fall and final binary deliverable with all assets due December 31, 2023.

If interested to in Project Eureka’s progress you can follow along by subscribing to the O3DE newsletter here

More Information

03DE official 

03DE Github 

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