O3DF Releases Open 3D Engine 22.10

The Open 3D Foundation has published Open 3D Engine version 22.10. This is the second major O3DE release of 2022, after 22.05 released in May. The updated version is now available for download on Windows and Linux (.deb), and can be installed beside previous versions.

As expected for a biannual release, this version includes an array of incremental improvements and new features for the engine, and tools.

Terrain System Preview

One of the most notable features in 22.10 is the engine's updated terrain system. According to the release notes, this preview supports maps up to 16 km by 16 km (and beyond) at high framerates. For reference, the New York City borough of Manhattan measures 21 km by 3.7 km, which this article from Mashable claims is comparable in size to the map from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Even larger game worlds, such as Grand Theft Auto V or The Witcher 3, could also theoretically fit within the 256 square kilometer area that O3DE now supports.

The Terrain System is available as an installable Gem.

Animation Features

O3DE 22.10 introduces several improvements to animation:

Root Motion Extraction for working with animations from sources like Adobe Mixamo
An experimental Motion Matching gem to blend seamlessly between different animation states
Overhauled ragdoll creation process, with improved support for joint limits and colliders

Improved Skies

The Atom Renderer has a new Sky Atmosphere feature based on an MIT licensed implementation of the Unreal Engine Sky Atmosphere Rendering Technique. The pull request calls out several new features:

Realistic atmospheric scattering
Limited shadowing and ground albedo support
Fast sky optimization for when inside atmosphere
Sun orientation using own transform or optional sun entity component property
Primitive sun radius, falloff, and color controls
Multiple atmosphere supported

The engine also has a Stars component, which has been ported from Amazon's previous Lumberyard engine.

Gem Creation Wizard

Developers now have the ability to create O3DE Gems from a graphical interface, in addition to the previous command line tools.

General Usability Improvements

The release notes call out several new features to improve usability in the editor:

New outline effect for highlighting selected entities
Optional effect for the Prefab Editor to gray out anything that's not part of the current prefab
Added visual feedback to show change in rotation of an entity in the editor
Project Manager now displays the engine version under each project