Is it possible that Unity and Unreal Engine have a new contender? The potential is there as Amazon has elected to make its Lumberyard 3-D game engine open source. The engine is now known as the Open 3D Engine, and it already has the backing of 20 companies including Niantic, Huawei, Amazon Web Services, and Apocalypse Studios, which is owned by veteran games dev Denis Dyack. The open source engine project will be overseen by the Linux Foundation.
This new open source form of Lumberyard is said to have a wide variety of benefits including a new front-end interface that makes it easy to use, a new renderer called the Atom Renderer, and the ability to create cross-platform games that work on PC, mobile, and console titles, all while being royalty-free. Devs who are already building on Lumberyard will still continue to receive support from Amazon, but Eric Morales, director of AWS game tech, has stated that Open 3D Engine is where new features will be heading. The engine itself is further described on its website as being capable of crafting “AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds, and high-fidelity simulations.”
For those who are curious about fiddling with this new engine, it has a dedicated website with various articles, while the engine itself is available on GitHub.
