>[!WARNING] Not Recommended > Unless you are super interested in game *engine* development, have a large team, and are willing to shoulder a massive pile of legacy code with no help, I can't recommend using this engine for anything. The Open 3D Engine is an [[Apache v2]] licensed 3D [[Engines|Game Engine]] written in [[C++]]. - [Website](https://o3de.org/) - [Source](https://github.com/o3de/o3de/) - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_3D_Engine) > Open 3D Engine is a free and open-source 3D game engine developed by Open 3D Foundation, a subsidiary of the [[Linux Foundation]] Formerly known as [Lumberyard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Lumberyard). # Notability I used [[Open 3D Engine|Amazon Lumberyard]] a little in [[2016]] and tried O3DE out again in mid-[[2023]] and wasn't thrilled with the experience. I verified that a bug I reported in [[2023]] was fixed in [[2025]]. # Philosophy ## Community A dead world. Despite the word "community" being used all over the home page, there doesn't actually seem to be one. Under "community content" is stuff like the official podcasts that haven't published anything in years and the official blog. It links a completely empty Mastodon account (still empty years later but still linked on the home page!). Even their [[Twitter]] is dead. Hard to see that as a community. They try to drive everything to their [[Discord]] server, which has 1/30th the number of users as the unofficial [[Godot]] Cafe server and 1/60th the number on one of the popular unofficial [[Unreal Engine]] servers. There are less than a tenth as many contributors to O3DE as there are to [[Godot]]. Most of the handful of active developers appear to be working for [[Cloud Imperium]] (the company behind [[Star Citizen]]) or [[Huawei]]. The complete lack of any search results returned when searching for anything with "O3DE" or "Lumberyard" when trying to troubleshoot indicates to me that despite it being open source, there is no real community around it and there are no real resources behind it from the corporations that purport to steward it. ## Scripting Scripting support for [[Lua]] and a visual scripting language called Canvas (which is different than "UICanvas"). Some subsystems also support [[Python]] out of the box, which is also used by many of the engine's internal tools as well. Confusingly, engine plugins and resource packs are called "Gems" - like in Ruby despite having little else in common. ## Issues Started going through the [[#Pong]] tutorial in late July [[2023]]. Ran into deal-breaking issues that made no sense and rapidly decreased my desire to continue working with it to zero. - Picker cannot find UI Canvas assets in subfolders - Finally fixed in June [[2025]] - Canvas variables cannot be used from the component view - Create variable in Canvas, initial value "from component" - Return to editor, set variable value in component - Run game, any duty that variable was intended to perform won't work - Exit game, check inspector, variable value is inexplicably empty ### Bug Reports >[!NOTE] 2025 Update I reported the above 2 bugs on [[Github]]. I didn't get a response to the first issue for years, and out of nowhere two years later a comment was left saying this was "already" fixed ... in the latest pre-release. I downloaded the pre-release and was able to confirm that finally, we are able to organize our assets into subfolders. As for the second issue, a contributor argued with me that the bug that I experienced and that was present and visible in their own tutorial video was un-reproducable and blamed the tutorial for being "old" even though I had just experienced the issue. After I pointed out the oddness of their reply given the facts they stopped responding. I closed the issue a year and a half later as "not planned" as part of a cleanup of old unaddressed issues that I expected would never be fixed. The "old" tutorial the contributor complained about is still, years later, recommended on the official website. ## Metaverse In [[2023]] there was still a big "Metaverse" banner on the home page. As of [[2025-06-17]], there is still a "Metaverse" "industry" button on the home page. To me, this is embarrassing. It was in [[2023]] and even more so in [[2025]]. # Platform Support ## Host - [[Windows]] (which?) - [[Linux]] - [[MacOS]] "experimental" ## Target Same as hosts, plus: - [[Android]] - [[iOS]] "experimental" # Features The way it models spaces and landscapes is cool if you're building the type of natural environments that the [[CryTek]] games are based on. It is trivial to build flowing water and paint the ground with different types of natural surfaces. With the features now in [[Unreal Engine]], most of the things that made [[CryEngine]] stand out are significantly less interesting. # History ## Lumberyard Began life as [[CryEngine]] 4, licensed by [[Amazon Corporation]] who released it as Lumberyard under a strange license that was free but required the use of [[AWS]] for any online functionality. Then in [[2021]], Amazon handed ownership to the Open 3D Foundation which open sourced it and re-branded it as the Open 3D Engine. # Tips ## First Build If the project fails to open after a failed asset build with an error like: ``` ReflectionProbeVisualization.materialtype failed to compile ``` Then you should attempt to build the project from the Project Manager menu first before trying to open it again. # Resources ## Tutorials ### Pong Official basic tutorial. The same one where I encountered several deal-breaking bugs in [[2023]]. ```cardlink url: https://www.docs.o3de.org/docs/learning-guide/samples/follow-along/pong/ title: "O3DE: Create a Simple Pong Game with O3DE" description: "Videos to guide you …" host: www.docs.o3de.org image: https://www.docs.o3de.org/img/logos/O3DE-Circle-Icon.png ``` ```cardlink url: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCQwFpnHSZQhhsr6iJqyeYqKe6dexnHh9 title: "O3DE Pong Tutorial Series" description: "Share your videos with friends, family, and the world" host: www.youtube.com favicon: https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/606e092f/img/logos/favicon_32x32.png image: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kK0XnYFKw38/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEXCOADEI4CSFryq4qpAwkIARUAAIhCGAE=&rs=AOn4CLBSkWuXU-VDPA2xmZLVu4CTqLYFcQ&days_since_epoch=20256 ```