New foundation wants to improve 3D software development with Open 3D Engine

The Linux Foundation is starting a new foundation that aims to accelerate the development of 3D games and applications. More than twenty parties participate in the foundation, such as Amazon, Adobe, Niantic and Red Hat. Amazon is making a 3d engine available for the project.

The new foundation is called the Open 3D Foundation or O3DF. The foundation is supported by Adobe, AWS, Huawei, Intel and Niantic, among others, but there are also smaller development studios such as Accelbyte, Gamepoch and Kitbash. The aim of the foundation is to stimulate the development of 3D services. This is done, among other things, by promoting collaboration between developers, setting up open source projects and supporting them with money or programmers.

The first most important step, according to the foundation, is that Amazon’s AWS makes its Open 3D Engine available under the Apache 2.0 license. The company has posted a developer preview on GitHub. O3DE is a successor to Amazon’s earlier Lumberyard project. Although Intel also participates in the foundation, the Open 3D Engine is slightly different from Intel’s Open3D.

The O3DE has a multithreaded ‘photorealistic’ renderer and a content editor. The software is now managed by the new foundation. Although the foundation is part of the Linux Foundation, developers can only use the engine on Windows in combination with Visual Studio.