O3DE Game Engine Seeing Progress On Linux Editor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: O3DE Game Engine Seeing Progress On Linux Editor

The Open 3D Engine spun out of Amazon's Lumberyard game engine has been seeing progress on Vulkan 1.2 API work as well as Linux porting at large, including the bringing up of the game engine's editor on Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=O3DE-Linux-Editor-Progress

[Alexmitter]

A engine for big boys, ready to use, vulkan, linux compatible editor soon, I hope this will seriously damage Epic Games with their Unreal Engine. At least Amazon did something meaningful with the shards of its game studio efforts.

[uid313]

Is this a good engine, how does it compare to Godot?

Does Amazon plan to keep developing this engine, or is it just a way for them to cut costs by pass on the maintenance costs to the Linux Foundation?

Lumberyard is designed around Amazon Web Services (AWS). Is it going to still be centered around AWS or is it going to be neutral?

Maybe Microsoft should counter this by either contributing Azure support to Lumberyard or creating an own game engine and release it under an open source license.

I wish Valve would release the Source Engine as open source.

[Turbine]

Is this a good engine, how does it compare to Godot?

Does Amazon plan to keep developing this engine, or is it just a way for them to cut costs by pass on the maintenance costs to the Linux Foundation?

Lumberyard is designed around Amazon Web Services (AWS). Is it going to still be centered around AWS or is it going to be neutral?

Maybe Microsoft should counter this by either contributing Azure support to Lumberyard or creating an own game engine and release it under an open source license.

I wish Valve would release the Source Engine as open source.

I'd hardly say Godot is a great engine.

[jayrulez]

Is this a good engine, how does it compare to Godot?

It is a lot larger than Godot(codebase, exported games).
The binaries are huge. If you're compiling it yourself then expect to spend at least 90 minutes waiting on fairly recent hardware and you should have at least 75 GB free.

If you're an indie and you don't need the power of a AAA type of engine (graphics fidelity, tooling etc...) then go with Godot.

If you're making a 2D game then you'll probably have a better time with Godot given that O3DE does not have 2D specific tooling (yet).

However, if you're working in a team on a3D game then O3DE has a lot more to offer than Godot (Better renderer, more and better tools).

Some people may say that Godot will be better for 3D with the 4.0 release. Most of them are just fanboys or they don't know what they are talking about (or both).
So far, the Vulkan render in Godot has been poorly implemented. It will offer a marginal improvement at best.

In the medium term, something like O3DE will be a better option than Godot for pretty much all kinds of games.

Does Amazon plan to keep developing this engine, or is it just a way for them to cut costs by pass on the maintenance costs to the Linux Foundation?

It seems they plan to keep developing it for at least some time. They are also being supported by other industry stakeholders as well.

Lumberyard is designed around Amazon Web Services (AWS). Is it going to still be centered around AWS or is it going to be neutral?

It is neutral. There is an optional AWS gem. There's nothing stopping anyone from adding support for XYZ cloud platform. O3DE has a pretty decent plugin architecture for things like this. Even the renderer is a plugin that someone can replace if they wanted to.

Maybe Microsoft should counter this by either contributing Azure support to Lumberyard or creating an own game engine and release it under an open source license.

I don't see a good reason for Microsoft to create their own game engine. One could argue that Amazon didn't need to create Lumberyard either. However, we're getting a dual licensed (Apache/MIT) AAA level engine from it so I won't complain. I could see them providing a gem for Azure support if O3DE becomes popular enough.

[tildearrow]

Bad rant

The name just annoys me a bit... Open 3D Engine? Sounds slightly boring when compared to Unreal, Source, CryEngine, Unigine, Unity or even Godot...

That's as if Adobe Photoshop was called Advanced Picture Editor, or as if Final Cut Pro were to be called Video Editing Toolkit...
Or as if FL Studio were to be called Music Production System...
Or as if Qt was called General UI Toolkit
Or as if Linux was called Free Unix Compatible Kernel
Or as if Vulkan were to be called Low Level Graphics Library
Or as if SuperTuxKart was called Open 3D Car Racing Game

The name "Open 3D Engine" sounds too generic...

[Sammaster]

Or as if Linux was called Free Unix Compatible Kernel

The acronym would be F. U. C. K

[Termy]

The name "Open 3D Engine" sounds too generic...

you could also say it shows a lot of confidence that it will become the new "standard"

[chocolate]

So far, the Vulkan render in Godot has been poorly implemented. It will offer a marginal improvement at best.

Could you please elaborate on that? I'm genuinely interested, I had high hopes for Vulkan in Godot. No fanboyism involved here, it should go without saying.

[kpedersen]

I wish Valve would release the Source Engine as open source.

Absolutely, Though I don't believe it will be able to compete with the others. Especially with indies. We evaluated it for one of our own projects and at the time my colleague was the developer who made Prospekt (one of the very few Half-Life 2 "in-universe" games). So this was quite useful to hear his experiences.

The engine has many benefits but it also has a number of complexities linking back to its idTech roots. For example it is still quite big on BSP compilers which need to be leakless. Designers need a lot of discipline to work with this. Ultimately this makes it less "fun" for indies.

It also doesn't have this idea of an all in one integrated "fun" editor. It has separate tools for the levels, animations, faces, speech, etc. I personally much prefer this however, I think these big editors are awkward for programmers.

That said, I think Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines had an interesting concept adding Python ontop of (an early version of) the Source engine. This does open it up a little more to indies.

I am not a massive fan of Valve's DRM (even sodding Hammer has it!) but they did very well with Source. It is a really good example of an engine with major legacy baggage. However with some of their recent VR titles, it still looks serviceable.