The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced an intent to form the Open 3D Foundation to accelerate developer collaboration on 3D game and simulation technology. The Open 3D Foundation will support open source projects that advance capabilities related to 3D graphics, rendering, authoring, and development. As the first project governed by the new foundation, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is contributing an updated version of the Amazon Lumberyard game engine as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. The Open 3D Engine enables developers and content creators to build 3D experiences unencumbered by commercial terms and will provide the support and infrastructure of an open source community through forums, code repositories, and developer events. A developer preview of O3DE is available on GitHub today. For more information and/or to contribute, please visit: https://o3de.org

3D engines are used to create a range of virtual experiences, including games and simulations, by providing capabilities such as 3D rendering, content authoring tools, animation, physics systems, and asset processing. Many developers are seeking ways to build their intellectual property on top of an open source engine where the roadmap is highly visible, openly governed, and collaborative to the community as a whole. More developers look to be able to create or augment their current technological foundations with highly collaborative solutions that can be used in any development environment. O3DE introduces a new ecosystem for developers and content creators to innovate, build, share, and distribute immersive 3D worlds that will inspire their users with rich experiences that bring the imaginations of their creators to life.

Squadron 42 is the single-player, story-driven portion of the world's most successful Kickstarter project, Star Citizen. The game, which originally made use of Crytek's CryEngine, has made the move to Amazon's CryEngine-based Lumberyard engine, which should deliver impressive visuals as well. Squadron 42 is being sold in a standalone version costing $45, and for that price, Cloud Imperium games is promising an epic sci-fi story, populated by more than 10 hours of performance capture of top-tier actors like Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, and Gillian Anderson, just to name a few (Andy Serkis also makes an appearance, he who is one of the most talented performance-capture actors of our times.)

With all those features, you'd be forgiven for asking "But will it run Squadron 42'" out of your current or future hardware - especially considering the history of CryEngine-based games. however, the system requirements are at the same time vague and, for the most part, unimpressive. They call for Windows 7 through 10 (DX11 title), a DX11-capable graphics card with minimum 2GB VRAM, and 4GB strongly recommended, a quad-core CPU, and the outlier of this sample, 16GB+ of system RAM. An SSD is also strongly recommended for the experience, which isn't all that surprising considering Lumberyard's roots.

Amazon might soon be caught in the crossfire between Crytek and Cloud Imperium Games over alleged unlawful usage of Crytek's intellectual property - and CryEngine - in the making of Kickstarter stars Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. However, that isn't stopping the company from further updating and increase ease of use of its game engine, which it licenses for free to would-be game developers - nor should it.

Software solutions such as SpeedTree 8, EMotionFX, and ScriptCanvas look to make sure that developers have access to a multitude of tools that allows them to populate their worlds with believable environments, characters, and scripting events, with the least amount of work and repetition possible. Cloud Gems is Amazon's Lumberyard cloud-connected features, which allows developers to build cloud-connected systems in their games, such as voice recognition, or even procedural voice generation for thousands of NPCs in an MMO - through the power of the Cloud. Starter Game is a way for would-be users of Lumberyard to acquaint themselves with the engines' capabilities, offering 500+ free assets and systems for those training wheels-required sessions. Read up on some of the new Lumberyard Beta 1.12 capabilities after the break, and feel free to follow the source links to download the engine - and maybe tinker with it.