O3DE 2111 Release Goals

[AMZN-Liv]

Linux support, new Windows installer, terrain system, and performance improvements will extend the capabilities available in the Developer Preview of the engine in the next release of O3DE, planned for the week of 11/29/21.

It’s been a busy few months since the formation of the Open 3D Foundation and availability of the Developer Preview of Open 3D Engine (Release 2106.1). While it’s still early days for the engine, partners and community members have been hard at work adding new features and improving overall engine stability. Today, the Release Special Interest Group (SIG) is excited to share some of our goals for the first stable release of O3DE and preview some of what we’re beginning to work on into early 2022. We cut the release branch for our next release candidate yesterday, stabilization/2110. Contributors can continue to work on new features in the development branch, and on hardening the release candidate for the next release of O3DE, planned for the week of 11/29/21.

2111.1 Release Candidate	Considering for the future
Engine tick system improvements	Mac OS Editor, Installer, Project Manager
Windows installer	Terrain performance & editor functionality
Ubuntu editor, packaged tar binaries, and project manager	Linux ARM support
Terrain System (Experimental)	Prefab overrides and scriptable asset pipeline
Script Canvas JSON serializer	Shader canvas tool
Script Canvas prefab compatibility	XR gem
Color Grading LUT generation in Editor	Networking enhancements: Bandwidth prioritization for specific entities, Game specific custom handshake negotiation, In-editor experience improvements (ctrl+g)
Viewport focus mode for prefabs
Network Scripting (Preview)
Remote gem management and dependency tracking

For the past several months, our primary focus for O3DE has been on improving the ease of use and clarity of tools that support the workflows that users are likely to experience during the first day and week of using the engine. We are continuing our ‘Rev the Engine’ workflow testing, through the UI-UX SIG, and are working with community members to get feedback on core engine workflows related to project setup and configuration, gameplay authoring, look development, team collaboration, and project packaging. One major area where we have the opportunity to improve the user experience is in the time it takes to set up the engine. For the next release of O3DE, we’ll be providing a Windows installer that removes the need to build the engine from source code.

To lay the groundwork for our work in 2022, there are several areas of the core engine that we have been focused on improving and stabilizing. When we introduced the new prefab system to O3DE, we knew that there would be a period of overlap as we transition off of the old slices system. Throughout the rest of this year and into early 2022, we are working on a number of features related to the prefab system to bring it up to parity with slices, including updates to the editor hierarchy to reflect changes to prefabs more efficiently, adding new capabilities to prefab spawning to make it easier to generate level content, and improving the interaction model in the editor viewport so that interacting with prefabs in a level is more intuitive.

In addition to prefab system improvements, we are also planning to work on a number of tasks related to the overall editor and engine performance by setting specific platform targets for frame rate and level complexity. As part of this work, we’ve identified issues with and begun improving the engine tick system, which will make gameplay more predictable and consistent across O3DE. We’ve also started a performance profiling initiative, which will make it easier for developers to understand and improve how their games and applications run.

One of the reasons that we released O3DE as a developer preview in July was to solicit feedback to open up engine development and planning to the community earlier on in the project. Two features in particular were widely discussed that we’ve been working on: Linux editor and runtime support, and an experimental terrain feature. We’re excited to see the progress that has been made by the community on unblocking 3D developers on Linux, and we want to help bring that work to our first major release since the Developer Preview. For this release, community members are working on bringing the runtime, editor, and asset processor to Ubuntu, while several partner and community members have been focused on supporting other Linux distributions. Work on the O3DE terrain system, one of the most discussed topics on the O3DE discussion forums, has started, with an RFC posted and initial development work landed in the development branch. A preview Terrain Gem will be available in the next release of O3DE. We will also continue to add authoring tools and performance improvements to the terrain system in 2022.

As a growing community, we’re actively exploring and developing new ways to operate as an open source team that works alongside partners and community members. This upcoming release will be the first where we collaborate on release notes and the launch process. We invite anyone in the community interested in participating in these discussions to join us in the Release SIG, as well as to leave comments and feedback on our release notes in this discussion thread as we prepare for our next release.

- Liv