O3de Alternatives

o3de reviews and mentions

• Valve releases Team Fortress 2 game code
  14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2025

  O3DE came from Amazon Lumberyard which came from CryEngine, so it's quite possibly one of the better looking open source 3D game engines that you can currently get, no strings attached: https://github.com/o3de/o3de

  Sadly, you need to put in a lot of work to get good results out of it (neither of its predecessors had a reputation for being easy to work with) and for whatever reason many studios aren't exactly rushing to invest a bunch of time into it (many just go for Unreal Engine 5, or stick with Unity etc., indies often opt for Godot), so you don't get much past simple example projects. Part of this is probably that it never generated a lot of hype or much of a community around it.

  Godot has a big community around it and is maturing pretty quickly, the early versions were pretty rough when it came to 3D (2.X and 3.X), but it's better now. Not as stable as Unity or Unreal but those have had the advantage of lots of years of work put into them, by more people than Godot has up until now.

  There's also more niche options like Stride (https://www.stride3d.net/) and Flax (https://flaxengine.com/) but they suffer from the same issues as O3DE, even if otherwise are promising.

• Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jun 2024
• Amazon Lays Off 180 Employees in Its Games Division
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Nov 2023
• Not only Unity...
  53 projects | /r/opensourcegames | 11 Nov 2023
• O3DE FOSS 3D Engine
  1 project | /r/Boiling_Steam | 23 Oct 2023
  1 project | /r/linux_gaming | 23 Oct 2023
• O3DE
  1 project | /r/hypeurls | 22 Oct 2023
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Oct 2023

  It's odd to me that when the whole Unity fiasco happened, everyone was basically looking at either Godot or Unreal, but pretty much nobody mentioned or cared for something like O3DE.

  If you praise Godot for being open source a lot, then it stands to reason that you should similarly prefer O3DE as opposed to Unreal: https://github.com/o3de/o3de/blob/development/LICENSE.txt (no idea why they're going for both Apache 2 and MIT license, though) vs https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license

  Unless people just care about the options that are popular enough to warrant their attention and the features that they provide, whereas the licensing is actually a boon, rather than the main factor, given that Unreal also did some slight price increases a while later as well: https://www.unreal-university.blog/post/unreal-engine-5-pric...

  Either way, it's still nice to have lots of options available regardless of the licensing details (though this kind of does fragment developers among bunches of different projects), be it Godot, O3DE, Stride, Unreal or even something like jMonkeyEngine (one of the rare Java engines/editors with 3D) or NeoAxis (that one had a cool voxel LOD solution, but performance on AMD hardware was bad).

• Unreal Engine change its price for non-game apps
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Oct 2023
• Alternative Game Engines for Marooned Unity Developers
  8 projects | /r/gamedev | 22 Sep 2023

  03DE: Open source game engine, under Apache License 2.0, developed by Amazon and the linux foundation. Seems to work under a modular package called "gems", that you can use to pull in the functionality you need. It uses c++ as it's main language, but you can use Lua, python or visual scripting for scripting stuff. Has multiplayer built into the engine and what they call a "robust" system for open-world games. There seems to be a lot of tutorials on the site, but they aren't laid out great.

• A note from our sponsor - InfluxDB
  www.influxdata.com | 12 May 2025

  InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now. Learn more →