Open 3D Engine (O3DE) 23.10 open source game engine released

Open 3D Engine (O3DE) has a big new release out, which includes plenty of new features and fixes for game developers looking to use this free and open source game engine.

It has pretty wide industry support with backers including Amazon AWS, Epic Games, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, oppo, Heroic Labs, Red Hat and plenty more. O3DE is based upon Amazon Lumberyard (itself based on CryEngine), which AWS contributed that's now under the Linux Foundation banner.

Some of what's new in O3DE 23.10 includes:

With the O3DE 23.10 Release comes several workflow enhancements, including unprecedented automations:

    Employ prefab overrides to change the details of objects (a car or house, for example) without having to create a new object
    Use script canvas for small graph nodes to handle simple arithmetic operations
    The document property editor allows tools creators to use data to create their UX rather than having to write the code or understand QT and filtering
    Easily and quickly publish content without the command line using automation improvements for installation

This newest release introduces a variety of visual and performance improvements to the rendering system:

    Better memory support: Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA) support and DirectX Memory Allocator (DX12MA)
    Mesh instancing
    Mobile shader performance improvement
    Framework for multi-GPU support 
    Addition of raytracing reflections

Additionally they mentioned there's improvements in the export ability for projects built with O3DE in Windows, Linux, Linux Server and iOS, along with build fixes for all platforms, including Windows, Linux and iOS.

Curiously, in their release blog post they included a quote from Lars Gleim a Senior Research Engineer at Huawei who said that O3DE is "the only really open game engine out there, and it’s the only fully open source, royalty-free solution that exists at this time". You'll have to forgive me if I act a little surprised here but…what? It's just not even remotely true. There's quite a few completely free and open source game engines out there. Seems a little shady to include that quote when I'm sure the people involved know it's not true. Their showcase page is incredibly bare too.

Update: they removed the quote mentioned above, with no mention of the post being edited.