Open 3D Engine

Open 3D Engine
Information
Type	Game engine
Industry	Video game development, simulation
Developer	Open 3D Foundation and community contributors
Written In	C++
Operating System	Windows, Linux, macOS (experimental)
License	Apache License 2.0 or MIT License
Supported Devices	Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, OpenXR-compatible headsets
Release Date	July 6, 2021 (Developer Preview)
Website	https://o3de.org

Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is a free and open-source, cross-platform real-time 3D engine for building games and simulations. It is maintained by the Open 3D Foundation, which the Linux Foundation announced it would form on July 6, 2021, and was created from an updated version of Amazon Lumberyard that Amazon Web Services (AWS) contributed as the foundation's first project. The source code is on GitHub; the default license is the Apache License 2.0, and users may choose the MIT License instead.

O3DE is built from modules called Gems, renders with its own physically based renderer, Atom, and can be scripted in Lua, in the node-based Script Canvas editor, or extended in C++ and Python. Virtual reality support comes from two optional Gems, XR and OpenXRVk, which connect the engine to OpenXR through its Vulkan renderer. They were added in release 23.05, and the release notes say the support was tested on the Meta Quest 2. The latest release as of October 2026 is 26.05.0, published on May 27, 2026.

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Checked every claim against the Linux Foundation and Open 3D Foundation announcements, O3DE release notes 2107.1 to 26.05.0, the GitHub release list, the OpenXR setup guide and Gem metadata, AWS Lumberyard documentation, TechCrunch and CG Channel coverage, the O3DE system requirements and features pages, and the Crossref record of the 2026 RA-L paper. About review dates.

History

Origins in Lumberyard

Amazon's earlier engine, Lumberyard, was based on Crytek's CryEngine. On July 6, 2021, the Linux Foundation announced its intent to form the Open 3D Foundation. As the foundation's first project, AWS contributed an updated version of Lumberyard under the name Open 3D Engine, released under the Apache 2.0 license as a Developer Preview on GitHub. Founding members named in the announcement included Adobe, AWS, Huawei, Intel, Niantic, Open Robotics, Red Hat, SideFX and Wargaming. Huawei's chief strategy officer Bryan Che named "AR/VR systems" among the areas where 3D graphics mattered to the company, and Niantic chief technology officer Phil Keslin said the engine would help developers "focus on AR world building".

AWS's blog post announcing the engine called it the "successor to Lumberyard" but also described it as "very different" from its predecessor. According to CG Channel, AWS had stripped out "over 2 million lines of legacy code"; the post said the company "kept the parts that customers loved most about Lumberyard and significantly revamped the rest". The Developer Preview (version 2107.1) introduced the Atom renderer, new SIMD math libraries, a new networking stack, prefabs in place of Lumberyard's slice system, a Project Manager, and CMake in place of the WAF build system. Its release notes describe it as "incomplete for many major development workflows". Amazon no longer offers Lumberyard binaries for download, and its documentation tells Lumberyard users to migrate to O3DE, "the official successor to Lumberyard".

Stable releases and foundation growth

The first stable release, 21.11, was announced on December 2, 2021. The foundation said that more than 250 developers had contributed over 2,182 pull requests and 1,801 issues since the July preview. The release added a Windows installer, a Debian package for Linux, an experimental terrain system and Script Canvas integration for the multiplayer networking system, and its SDK covered Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android. The same announcement said the first O3DECon conference had been held in October 2021, with 36 sessions and more than 250 attendees.

On July 20, 2022, Epic Games joined the foundation as a premier member. The other premier members at that time were Adobe, AWS, Huawei, Intel, LightSpeed Studios, Microsoft and Niantic. In its coverage of release 22.10, TechCrunch wrote that the foundation provided a neutral place to work on shared interoperability standards, and noted that the release's terrain system could scale to 16 by 16 km worlds.

Release 24.09 let installer users build projects with only Script Canvas and Lua, without a C++ compiler, and its release notes claimed mobile performance gains of "up to 400%" across iOS, Android and AR/VR/XR devices. In the foundation's June 2025 announcement of release 25.05.0, its executive director, Joe Bryant, described the release's changes as ranging "from streamlined VR integration to cutting-edge robotics simulation and expanded documentation". Release 26.05, published in May 2026, added an experimental Open Particle System Gem, made PhysX 5 the default for new projects and deprecated PhysX 4, and began deprecating legacy classes inherited in the CryCommon library. The foundation's February 2026 review of the previous year said two major releases were planned for 2026, 26.5.0 and 26.10.0.

Release history

O3DE versions are numbered by year and month. Dates below are the dates the releases were published on the project's GitHub page.

Version	Published	Selected changes
2107.1 (Developer Preview)	2021-07-06	First public release; Atom renderer, Gems, CMake build system, new networking stack
21.11 (2111.1)	2021-12-02	First stable release; Windows installer, Debian package, experimental terrain
22.05.0	2022-05-12	Motion Matching animation system, User Defined Properties, "remixable" materials
22.10.0	2022-10-11	Terrain system scaling to 16 x 16 km worlds, project sharing by URL
23.05.0	2023-05-03	XR and OpenXRVk Gems, Material Canvas, PhysX 5.1 support, Multiplayer Sample game
23.10.0	2023-10-09	Linux Snap packages, improved project export, start of iOS and Android support in Atom
24.09.0	2024-10-09	Script-only projects, OpenXR action and space APIs, Android project generator
25.05.0	2025-06-17	OpenXR 1.1.41, automatic Meta Quest Mobile SDK setup, ROS 2 simulation interfaces
25.10.0	2025-10-15	Reworked installer, C++20 compatibility, VR controller components in the OpenXR Gem
26.05.0	2026-05-27	Experimental Open Particle System, PhysX 5 by default, AgX and Khronos PBR Neutral tone mapping

Maintenance releases followed several of these versions; the most recent before 26.05.0 was 25.10.2, published on January 27, 2026.

Features

O3DE is assembled from Gems, modules that bundle libraries and assets. Each engine system is supplied by a Gem, so a project includes only the systems it needs, and precompiled Gems can be added or removed without recompiling the engine. The Atom renderer is a multi-threaded, physically based renderer that supports Forward+ and deferred rendering, the DirectX 12, Vulkan and Metal graphics APIs, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Shaders are written in AZSL, an extension of HLSL.

Runtime logic can be written in Script Canvas, a visual scripting tool based on node graphs, or in Lua, and both can be used on the same entity. The editor and the asset pipeline can be extended with Python 3. Physics uses NVIDIA PhysX, with NVIDIA Cloth for fabric and AMD TressFX for hair. A networking Gem provides TCP and UDP transport, entity replication, and both player-hosted and dedicated-server models. Assets and asset manifests use JSON, prefabs are stored in a human-readable text format, and projects are configured through JSON files and built with CMake, which creates build files for the developer's native IDE and toolchain.

XR support

Release 23.05.0 added stereoscopic rendering for VR through OpenXR. According to the release notes, the support was built on the Vulkan backend and "extensively tested using Quest 2", and Atom gained a VR render pipeline for apps that run natively on the headset. The work was split into two Gems. XR is an abstraction layer for any XR platform, and OpenXRVk implements OpenXR with Vulkan as the render backend. Both Gems are kept in the separate o3de-extras repository and, like the engine, are licensed under Apache 2.0 or MIT.

The 23.05 release ran O3DE levels on the Meta Quest 2 in two ways: natively on the headset, or rendered on a PC and sent to the headset over a Link cable. The editor's game mode could also run in the headset over Link, so developers could view level changes in VR straight away. The release used a new multi-view render pipeline with simplified render passes for VR devices (see Single-pass stereo rendering), an XR Camera Movement component for head-tracked camera movement and basic controller input, and an OpenXRTest sample project. The project's setup guide lists head and hand pose data, controller input state and haptic response among the Gems' features. It also calls the Gems "proof of concept" and lists limitations: 2D interface rendering (ImGUI and LyShine) is not yet supported in VR, and the lean pipeline for running natively on the Quest 2 has no shadows, reflections or post-processing other than tone mapping.

Later releases extended this support:

Release	XR changes
24.09.0	Data-driven Lua and C++ APIs for OpenXR actions (input and output) and spaces (world transform anchors) across OpenXR-compatible hardware; an Android Project Generator that can target the Meta Quest family, which the foundation said cut on-device iteration from about 1 minute 30 seconds to under 10 seconds; crash fixes for Quest devices
25.05.0	OpenXR dependency updated from 1.0.22 to 1.1.41; the Meta Quest Mobile SDK is now installed automatically by the third-party packaging system. The foundation credited Meta with the simpler setup
25.10.0	Components for VR controllers and an interaction ray added to the OpenXR Gem; OpenXR Gem re-enabled on Linux; a shading precision fix for Meta Quest 3

The 26.05.0 release notes list no XR-specific changes.

Simulation and robotics

O3DE is also used for robotics simulation. Release 23.05 made significant improvements to the ROS2 Gem, which connects the engine to the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2). Release 25.05 implemented the ROS 2 simulation interfaces standard, which the release notes describe as a joint effort of Open Robotics, NVIDIA and the Open 3D Foundation through Robotec.ai. A 2026 study in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters by Ángel Soriano and colleagues benchmarked O3DE against Gazebo, Webots, Unity and NVIDIA Isaac Sim for ROS 2 mobile-robot simulation and described O3DE as "a promising native-ROS 2 alternative".

Supported platforms

The O3DE Editor runs on Windows 10 version 20H2 or later and on Ubuntu Linux. Development on macOS and on Ubuntu for 64-bit ARM processors is experimental. The documented minimum is a quad-core 64-bit x86 processor, 16 GB of RAM and a DirectX 12 or Vulkan graphics card with 2 GB of VRAM. CG Channel reported that compiled 26.05 binaries were available for Windows 10 or later and Ubuntu 22.04. Projects can be exported to Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. The XR Gems target OpenXR-compatible devices in general, but the setup guide was written for the Meta Quest 2 and Windows PCs.

See also

• Amazon Lumberyard
• CryEngine
• Godot
• Unity
• Unreal Engine
• OpenXR
• Game engine