Open 3D Engine Gets New Tools While O3DE Jam Is Announced for This Weekend

wccftech.com:

The Open 3D Foundation shared several news today, starting with the release of the next version of the Open 3D Engine, a cross-platform open source project based on a fork of Amazon's Lumberyard engine (itself spun off Crytek's CryEngine).

O3DE version 23.05 is the result of nearly six thousand code commits that together change over three million lines of code. Front and center is the addition of Material Canvas, a new interface for visual scripting that combines the capabilities of Script Canvas and the Material Editor in a single, powerful tool. With Material Canvas, users of the Open 3D Engine will be able to create custom shaders and generative materials. The Material Pipeline provides easier customization while balancing the performance and quality of the rendering pipeline, and the Asset Browser includes several layout options and an asset inspector panel to optimize asset management.

Physics got a boost in O3DE version 23.05 thanks to the introduction of PhysX 5.1, which can improve simulation performance by up to 15% over PhysX 4. On the animation side, the editor has been improved, the animation asset import has been streamlined, and the AnimGraph now comes with a Performance Visualizer to aid users in optimizing their AnimGraphs.

Landscaping has been made easier with the new paintbrush tool available to sculpt terrain, and there's also a Terrain Developer Guide that users can read to understand how the terrain system works in the Open 3D Engine.

Developers of VR and XR applications or games will be glad to learn that OpenXR compatible devices are now supported with the OpenXR and OpenXRVk Gems. Mobile developers also got something nice: the Atom renderer now supports half-float, improving performance.

The O3DF also