It's been nearly five years already since the start of O3DE as the Open 3D Engine that began as Amazon's Lumberyard project spun into an open-source project under the Linux Foundation umbrella. Out this week is O3DE 26.05 for shipping the latest improvements to this cross platform game engine.

O3DE 26.05 has seen a lot of work for improving the stability of this 3D game engine plus it also previews some new features and makes other refinements. One of the most notable changes with O3DE 26.05 is the experimental Open Particle System being introduced. The Open 3D Engine's Open Particle System is explained as:

"O3DE now contains a new gem for authoring visual effects (VFX) using particles. It provides a simulation runtime that is directly integrated with the Atom render, a dedicated editor that can be used for previewing particles during their creation, and several examples to demonstrate the included capabilities. Three particle types are supported - sprite, ribbon and mesh - and several modules can be applied to affect their behaviors (e.g. color, force, speed)."

On the game editor side, O3DE 26.05 adds support for creating C++ components from within the editor using a new graphical tool rather than resorting to the command line. This O3DE release also deprecates the old PhysX 4 support, upgrades its simulation interface, supports newer versions of the prominent compiler toolchains, and relies now on its own bundled CMake for its build system.

Downloads and more details on this new O3DE engine release at GitHub.