O3DE Contributor Spotlight: Reece Hagan

Open 3D Engine (O3DE) thrives thanks to the passion and creativity of contributors around the world. This month, we’re relaunching the Contributor Spotlight and excited to spotlight Reece Hagan, a self-taught programmer whose journey in coding and gaming started at 11 years old which has led him to make impactful contributions to O3DE today.

What type of games do you enjoy, and what do you like about them?

I love Japanese rhythm games more precisely the Project DIVA series due to the amount of effort they put into the real-time rendered music videos and the difficulty of its maps. I also enjoy playing games like Xonotic, Tower Unite and Jet Set Radio.

I’ve always used platforms like GitHub. But the first time I actually contributed to an open source project was with O3DE in 2024.I was trying to create my own engine for a game I wanted to work on and while it was fun creating that engine, there were times where I really just wanted to work on the game but the engine wasn’t good enough for that. Seeing O3DE become more stable on Linux, I decided to give it another shot, and now I contribute to the engine making it even better on the Linux platform.

What are some of the things you’ve worked on in O3DE so far?

Sune is my audio engine with plans to make it more feature-rich, and TuRml is an RmlUi integration for O3DE.

These are some PRs I’ve done for O3DE:

– DX12 Fix check for wive operation

– Vulkan HDR Support

– XCB implement GetDisplayRefreshRate

– Fix and re-enable OpenXR support for Linux.

And pretty soon, initial Wayland support.

What were some of the stability fixes you addressed?

Fixed the miniaudio gem to use GetID over GetHint. This mainly affects final shipped builds, as they don’t keep the audio asset’s path (hint), only the ID so in a shipped build you could have a problem of one sound overwriting another.

How has the project evolved since its inception?

I checked out the engine in possibly late 2023 and it has improved a lot since then.

What would you like to see added to the Open 3D Engine to help new users?

O3DE is a wonderful community. It would be helpful to have documentation tailored for developers transitioning from Unreal Engine or Unity, along with guides that are less technical and more beginner-friendly. It’s great to hear that the documentation team is already working on this.

Anything else you’d like to share with the community?

The Sune and TuRml gems are located on the Tuyuji GitHub organization; contributions are welcome.

I do things outside of O3DE, right now I’m working on my own Wayland compositor and if you’re interested in seeing that kind of stuff, I put updates on my bluesky and the Tuyuji Discord, which can be found on my github.

💡 Want to be our next O3DE Contributor Spotlight? 

We love celebrating the incredible developers, creators, and community members who make the Open 3D Engine (O3DE) ecosystem stronger every day. If you would like to be highlighted next, please fill out this 5 minute form here. We can’t wait to spotlight more of the amazing people building with O3DE! 🚀

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