[aidanhs]

Context: O3DE is an open source (Apache 2) AAA game engine based on an updated Amazon Lumberyard

I've had the opportunity to work with O3DE over the past few months at work and I'm very excited to see where it goes.

There are two pieces of context if you don't work in the games industry (when I came in from an 'open source' background these surprised me):

1. the best game engine tech in the industry is proprietary (the biggest players are Unreal and Unity, lots of studios have purpose-built ones), there's relatively little open source [0]

2. in a games studio, the workflow of your company orients around the workflows of the game engine [1]

These two things combine in quite unfortunate ways, to the point where EA mandated the use of its own in-house engine...with mixed results so far [2][3]. Smaller players have three options: a) suck it up, b) use an open source alternative (i.e. Godot), c) get caught in the tarpit of "build your own engine"

O3DE has an opportunity to shake things up - particularly because of how modular it aims to be. At Hadean, our interest is in the networking layer (to drop in as netcode for Aether, our distributed simulation engine) as well as the 'core' simulation layer (to integrate with Aether in order to scale O3DE games/simulations across multiple machines). While doing all this, we will probably 'get involved' and contribute, so that our usage doesn't drift too far from mainline.

Anyway, this is all very early days - it's just a developer preview, and the flows are a bit rough. It'll be a while before we see if this changes things (I'm hopeful!), but major credit to the people at Amazon who have made it happen so far!

p.s. a checkout with deps, plus fresh compile of O3DE, plus a new project that you've opened once (to process assets) will set you back 100-150GB at my last check - not unexpected if you're used to compiling Unreal!

[0] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1406427706980454406

[1] https://isetta.io/interviews/AmandineCoget-interview/#the-mo...

[2] https://twitter.com/kingcurrythundr/status/10837887204599726...

[3] https://screenrant.com/anthem-frostbite-engine-development/

[_hao]

After having dealt with and released projects with Unreal/Unity and done some experimenting with Godot throughout the years I've completely ditched the idea of using a 3rd party engine for any serious project of mine. I think they're fine for quick prototyping, but I'd take the full control and learning experience of having a custom engine for whatever I want to do than to a) try to fit my design/vision in whatever paradigm the engine is made to work for b) in the chance of a hit (unlikely) give out what could be a substantial amount of money to Unity/Epic (this doesn't cover Godot obviously) and c) I want to own my source and not have done obscene amounts of work in basically closed source environments that don't guarantee future support etc.

I don't recommend this to the general user or game dev though. Most people just want to create their game. I want to do that and have the control. Yeah, I can't make AAA engine by myself, but then again even if I could the assets for a AAA game are staggering. I think the industry should actually pull the reigns a bit on these enormous budget pieces of entertainment software for it's own good and scale back a bit, but anyways, that's another discussion.

As for Amazon and this initiative I wouldn't touch it based on principle since I don't want to support Amazon and their business practices.

[SXX]

> As for Amazon and this initiative I wouldn't touch it based on principle since I don't want to support Amazon and their business practices.

Are you also not using Linux and other open source software that Amazon contributed to?

This is real open source project now without CLA attached. Any company can fork it and do something nice with it.

[41209]

Your still using frameworks like Open GL though right ?

I think this ultimately depends on if you want to ship or not. I think Unity is the best option for most people due to its ease of use. But I also respect wanting full control, sometimes Unity feels like a magic black box.

Best pray the black box does what you want.

[_hao]

> Your still using frameworks like Open GL though right ?

Correct. OpenGL, Vulkan and libs like SFML, SDL, Allegro are some of the choices that people like me use. Of course there are million media frameworks with bindings for a lot of languages. You can do whatever you want really.

And I'd agree with you. I think of the 3 engines I wrote about in my original comment Unity is by far the most painless to work with and I like the UI of the engine itself the most.

[paavohtl]

OpenGL is not a framework. It's a standardised relatively low level API for graphics programming.

[Thaxll]

"so that our usage doesn't drift too far from mainline"

Famous last words.