Linux Foundation Launches Open 3D Foundation, Amazon Lumberyard Spun As Open 3D Engine

The Linux Foundation and their partners are today announcing their intent to form the Open 3D Foundation to help foster 3D game and simulation technologies. As a key part of this new Open 3D Foundation, Amazon's Lumberyard game engine that started off based on CryEngine is going to see an Apache 2.0 licensed copy made available as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE).

An "updated version" of Amazon's Lumberyard game engine is going to form the basis of the new Open 3D Engine being maintained by the Open 3D Foundation. Amazon previously made Lumberyard available on GitHub while keeping to a proprietary license but this move is indeed seeing Open 3D Engine made available under an Apache 2.0 license and "unencumbered by commercial terms and will provide the support and infrastructure of an open source community through forums, code repositories, and developer events."

Open 3D Engine

This new Open 3D Engine will be available on GitHub as o3de/o3de. This is not to be confused with Intel's own open-source project called Open3D (Open3D.org) for dealing with 3D data and under an MIT license.

O3DE with this updated Lumberyard code has a new multi-threaded "photorealistic" renderer, an extensible 3D content editor, and other modern features.

Besides Amazon AWS being involved with the Linux Foundation's new Open 3D Foundation, other notable vendors involved include AccelByte, Adobe, Apocalpyse Studios, International Game Developers Association, Niantic, PopcornFX, Red Hat, and Wargaming, among others.

The Open 3D Foundation website will be opening up today at o3d.foundation.

It will be interesting to see how this Open 3D Foundation and Open 3D Engine evolve over the months ahead. In today's embargoed news release there was no real mention of this being about Linux gaming -- while being an initiative backed by the Linux Foundation -- but rather a move about fostering open-source 3D efforts across vendors.

Amazon Lumberyard to date has been just focused on Linux dedicated server support with Linux client and editor support left in-progress for years. Given that Amazon Lumberyard hasn't been too widely adopted and from the Amazon perspective have been using it to try to push along AWS tech and Twitch game streaming, one has to wonder if this is just Amazon's way of trying to offload the development of the game enigne moving forward. If O3DE gets used by some major games, it will be interesting to see if there are any Linux ports to emerge considering the lack of Linux ports from existing Amazon Lumberyard games and Linux not being an officially supported platform. Amazon Game Studios also hasn't been releasing for Linux.

Update: Yep, this Open 3D Engine effort backed by the Linux Foundation so far requires Microsoft Windows and Visual Studio...