Blog
Calling All Open Source 3D Developers: Let’s Jam in the Wasteland!
April 26, 2023
One theme. One open source 3D engine. Eighty hours. Limitless possibility. Join us May 5-7, 2023, for the first ever O3DE Jam! With a theme of “Navigating the Wasteland,” this virtual hackathon-style competition will provide a showcase for open source developers around the world and unleash the power of Open 3D Engine (O3DE). So, put on your creativity cap, download the latest version of O3DE, and prepare to show us things we might find in a postapocalyptic future – and how those things interact with their wasteland surroundings....Vectors, Matrices & Matrix Order
March 1, 2023
In this blog post, AWS engineer John Coimbra Walsh covers the basics of using vectors, matrices, and matrix order. This is a complicated topic for novice graphics programmers, and hopefully this breakdown can help you! Matrices & vectors An \(n \cdot m\) matrix consists of \(n\) rows and \(m\) columns. The product of two matrices \(\mathbf{A}\) and \(\mathbf{B}\) is well defined when the number of columns in \(\mathbf{A}\) matches the number of rows in \(\mathbf{B}\)....Google Test Matchers - Part 3
February 8, 2023
Google Test Matchers - Part 3 Topic Wrapping up the introduction to Google Test matchers. Please see Parts 1 and 2 for more information. Motivation Making use of helpful library features to improve the readability, succinctness and maintainability of our tests. Examples Custom Matchers In Part 2 we touched on writing our own custom matchers with certain math types but didn’t really explain them. In this entry we’ll look a bit closer at what’s required....Google Test Matchers - Part 2
January 25, 2023
Google Test Matchers - Part 2 Topic Continuing the introduction to Google Test matchers. Please see Part 1 for more information. Motivation Shorter, clearer tests that take the boilerplate and fragility out of testing. Examples Math types Matchers can be very useful when writing unit tests for math types (which nearly always require some sort of epsilon check). We know to use EXPECT_NEAR when testing floating point values but this can get unwieldy when working with vector or matrix types....Google Test Matchers - Part 1
January 11, 2023
Google Test Matchers - Part 1 Topic An introduction to Google Test matchers with a focus on how they can improve the quality of our tests. Motivation We want tests to be fast to write, fast to run, easy to understand and informative when they fail. With Google Test matchers we can achieve all these and more. Google Test matchers are an incredibly useful tool to simplify our unit and integration tests....The “Magical” World of Compilers, Linkers, and Loaders
December 28, 2022
In this blog from O3DE Technical Steering Committee member Jeremy Ong, he goes through the process of compilation and linking used by the MSVC compiler - useful for when you start encountering compilation and linking issues! Compilers and linkers are not always at the forefront of our minds when we code. At best, we often work off of a vague mental model of how they behave, but while our imperfect intuition might serve us well in many circumstances, not having a more comprehensive view can certainly get us into trouble....Remote object support in Open 3D Engine
December 14, 2022
Background In the 21.11.0 release of O3DE, we added the ability to display Gems outside the official Gem catalog. Using Project Manager, you can register an external Gem source on a web server with O3DE metadata to display, pull, and register remote Gems. This new workflow makes sharing Gems the community creates easier by removing manual steps. Before the 22.11.0 release, adding an external Gem was a manual process of downloading and extracting the Gem, then using the O3DE CLI scripts to register the Gem for the current engine....Repost: The making of the Imagination O3DE ray tracing GDC 2022 demo
December 7, 2022
After a couple of years of not being able to attend in person, earlier this year, Imagination was delighted to be able to send a team of both first-timers and experienced veterans to attend the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco in March 2022. This mix of experiences proved to be perfect for a trip that was both enjoyable and productive for the Imagination team. As ever, the main aim was to connect with our network of partners, collaborators, and clients and to present our recent and upcoming advancements to other companies and game developers in general....CMake Essentials Series - Part 4
November 16, 2022
In this last installment we’ll cover the necessary commands to install a library for use in other projects. Motivation Over the course of this series we’ve learnt how to use CMake and make use of existing libraries, but not what is involved in authoring new libraries that others can easily integrate. By following these best practices we can make our libraries easy to use and more likely to be adopted....O3DE Visual Studio 2022 Support!
November 9, 2022
With the 22.10.0 release of Open 3D Engine (O3DE), Visual Studio 2022 (VS2022) is now fully supported within O3DE. Background When we say that O3DE “fully supports” Visual Studio 2022, we are referring to building O3DE projects using Visual Studio 2022 v143 toolset . Because O3DE uses CMake as its build system generator, it has been possible since the release of CMake 3.21 to configure and attempt to build using Visual Studio 2022....