Get Speed and Efficiency Improvements in O3DE 23.10 and Join the First Open 3D Connect Virtual Meetup

We’re excited to announce the newest release of the Open 3D Engine (O3DE) Version 23.10, which brings loads of new enhancements for robotics simulation developers, industry-first automations, and support for ARM64 on Linux to significantly reduce development costs, along with usability and performance improvements. You can catch these new capabilities in action next week at ROSCon on October 18-22 in New Orleans.

On the heels of this release, we’re also thrilled to introduce Open 3D Connect, virtual monthly community meetups, starting with the first meetup tomorrow, October 11, at 11 am PDT, 8 pm CEST. These monthly meetups are a great opportunity to build connections, learn about O3DE, and get your questions answered. You can expect engaging share sessions designed to accommodate all levels of expertise, with guidance, step-by-step demos, and handy tips and tricks. Come join us, and submit your questions in advance!

A big thank you to our incredible community for their tireless energy in advancing the Open 3D Engine, and opening up new possibilities for creators who value a flexible, modular approach to 3D development. We’re deeply thankful for their relentless dedication and inspired by their accomplishments with this latest release. 

Read on for a few of the highlights of this latest release, dive into the details in the release notes, and don’t miss the community meetup!

Open 3D Engine’s Modular Approach Empowers Robotics Developers

Open 3D Engine’s modular design means you can fine-tune it for your exact needs, especially important in robotics. This flexibility, coupled with the tightest ROS2 integration in the industry, makes O3DE a great fit for ROS developers, who often face a diverse set of demands and trade-offs when building their projects.

“O3DE has what I consider to be the best kind of ROS integration, in the sense that we write ROS2 code in the simulator,” said Adam Dąbrowski, VP of Robotics and Simulations at Robotec.ai. “So, we can use all the packages directly without any bridges, which has a tremendous impact on performance and enables us to communicate directly to the ROS ecosystem and record data efficiently.”

With O3DE, robotics developers can enable—and disable—different aspects of the engine based on their specific needs. This newest release introduces a host of new features for robotics development:

• Redesigned manipulation components
• Finger and vacuum grippers
• Improved robot import feature for SDF and URDF formats
• Greater performance for camera and LiDAR sensors
• New contact sensor, plus the ability to add your own sensors

Elevate Your Authoring Experience with New, Industry-First Automations 

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

Dive into Enhanced Graphics and Rendering Performance

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

Other improvements in this latest release includes improved ability to export projects from O3DE in Windows, Linux, Linux Server and iOS, along with build fixes for all platforms, including Windows, Linux and iOS.

Recent developments across the industry to change licenses and boost fees for developers has led to an increased interest in open source 3D engines, like the Open 3D Engine. We’re incredibly proud of our community’s progress in advancing O3DE in an open way, and we can’t wait to see what they accomplish next!

We have retracted a quote from this blog that stated that O3DE is the ‘only real open source game engine.’ The quote was never intended to be included and very unfortunately was taken out of context before we were able to make the correction. We deeply regret any misunderstanding, harm or inconvenience caused.