 What makes Open 3D Engine shine as opposed to the other engines is kind of its underlying architecture that allows for the communication between different parts of the engine. They've got a really nice and well thought out event driven system that has, as we've been working with it, or at least as I've personally been working with it, has kind of changed how I program. Hi, this is Yoho Soplin Parthia and today we have with us Jack Kalina, project manager of Project Eureka at the Open 3D Foundation and A.J. Biswas, lead programmer for once again Project Eureka. Before we talk about this whole collaboration between Open 3D Foundation and RIT University, I would like to just quickly understand what is Open 3D Foundation all about? So the Open 3D Foundation is a sort of umbrella organization for housing the Open 3D Engine project. It's part of the Linux Foundation and is really focused on making the Open 3D Engine. When we look at Open 3D Game Engine, there are already, depending on who you look, you know, Unreal, I mean there are tons of there. What is the need of this project or this foundation? So the main difference, the primary difference, the selling difference actually, between Open 3D Engine and the big engines that are out there like Unity and Unreal, is that Open 3D or O3DE for short is a fully open source and what that means is that anybody can essentially take the engine and they can use it for their own purposes and modify it for their own needs. They can fork it and like I said they can kind of create specifically what they want with it and they can kind of, as a result, they don't have to deal with things like licensing and things like that that you would have to deal with from Unity and Unreal. And it's also extremely modular in terms of its architecture as compared to Unity and Unreal and those other engines, which allows for a lot of easy like flexibility and extendability in terms of like what you can do with it. So is the primary idea behind the Open 3D Engine is to offer free beer or because, you know, Unity and they also offer free versions to individuals or smaller teams, you know, that you can leverage or the idea is more to do with the free as in freedom or open source idea where you also get to see the guts of it and you have more control over it. So I just want to understand when we do talk about the difference between the commercial ones and the open source one, what are the clear benefits which game developers can see there? At least for us, so we're not, you know, the ones leading the development or actually part of the foundation, we're just developers working in it. I think we kind of see both. We both see that sort of it's free to use. We don't have to worry about paying royalties or licensing fees for the game when we publish it. And then we also can essentially do a dive into the part of the engine to figure out why an issue isn't working or to make a fix that we need or there's a feature that we want to add that isn't already there. We can just go right in, add it, put in a pull request and then get it available for everyone else. So I think it's for us, at least it definitely feels like both. I would say that the primary thing is that you can do whatever you want to the engine. You have access to all the code. It's all completely open source, hence the name. You have access to all that. And as a result, you can also modify it in whatever way you see fit, which is not something you can do with any of the current engines. So it goes back to the same analogy if you look at, you know, why, I mean, it's not that why, but Mac OS, Windows versus using Linux big distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora or, you know, REL or SUSE or ARCH or GENTU. You get that freedom, that control over tinkering. And then, so, yeah, it does. Now, let's talk about Project Eureka. What is the goal behind this project? So Project Eureka is a partnership between RIT and Magicswell Studios RIT and the Open 3D Foundation. The goal is to provide funding for student teams to take a game they are already working on or want to start working on and have them work for whatever the set amount of time they decide on to create their game, publish it, release it in Open 3D Engine. So for us, the development is around about six months of development. The primary, like, benefits that students get from doing such a thing is that we get things like connections and we get to put ourselves out there like we are right now, as we speak. That's like, these are the primary reasons why at least we're doing this. It's because this is definitely a very good opportunity for undergraduates such as ourselves to kind of get our foot into the industry. All at the same time, from the Open 3D perspective, they get to utilize this project to get their own engine out there, get it more noticed and also from the Project Eureka kind of doubles as sort of a testing sort of thing for them as well because as we develop this game in an engine that is still largely in development, they find a lot of bugs that we come across and we open up issues for them to look at and like for example over these past five or six months that we've been developing, we found a lot of things for them to work on that I'm pretty sure that they would have otherwise would have taken them a while to realize that was something that they need to deal with right then and there. So this has been kind of a win-win situation for both sides in my opinion. I want to go back to the point that we were discussing earlier because you bought in Project Eureka is that if you look at game developers, of course, it may be different from somebody building a game, writing a game for commercial purpose or somebody writing a game just for fun, just exploration. I mean, we do both things, right? A lot of things for fun and a lot of things for commercial. From the perspective of game developer and let's just forget about that it's free of cost or other things, what are the benefits that you see of using Open 3D engine versus commercial engine is once again, I'm going purely from a game developer's perspective. It could be either more work or it could be less work because of the open source. So talk about that experience. I would say that from a purely development perspective, what makes Open 3D engine shine as opposed to the other engines is kind of its underlying architecture that allows for the communication between different parts of the engine. They've got a really nice and well thought out event driven system that has as we've been working with it or at least as I've personally been working with it has kind of changed how I program to be honest. It's really nice. And on top of that, like I said earlier, the engine is modular and what that essentially means is that it's all broken up into what they call gems or just plugins and the creation of a new plugin is actually really seamless. I haven't actually looked into how hard or difficult it is to create your own plugin for Unreal or Unity. But I haven't really, from what I've seen, it's probably a bit more, there is a bit more nuance to it than there is with Open 3D engine because with O3D is actually a really simple process. And of course, as you said, the Open 3D engine is in the very early stage is still in development. But what role do you folks, of course, it's not that you're not building a next company. I'm not looking from that perspective. But what role do you see for the larger gaming market? And we can also draw some comparison where if you look at Ubuntu or if you look at Steam Deck or Steam, it is leveraging Linux. It enabled them to bring a device also. Steam Deck is there, it's steam that we're into. OLED is also out now there. So it does enable a lot of new business opportunities. So when you look at either Project Eureka or you look at Open 3D engine, what kind of market possibility you see there? It may be hard to say at this point, but still, if you look at the larger market. I mean, just from the fact that it's open source, you can use it without licensing, all that. You look at what happened, you know, month, two months ago with Unity, where they completely changed their pricing plan and threw everyone for a loop. We were here like, wow, glad we're not working in Unity because we don't even have to worry about this because it's all open source, it's all free to use. So I think, you know, I think that'll probably be one of the major impacts. Besides how modular and the E-Bus says, like working in it has initial hurdles, but once you figure it out, it's so nice to work in. But I think in terms of like a market impact, having a sort of third open source option for 3D besides Unity and Unreal, I think that's going to be its biggest impact. And I think the effect that in my opinion, the engine is the most easily customizable of the three. What kind of games you folks are developing if you're developing any at this point? Project Eureka, obviously the point is that students make a game for the allotted amount of time. For us, that time has been from about late May to December 31st, and we plan to release early January. So our game that we're making, the game name is called State of Matter. It is a science fiction, futuristic first person puzzle shooter combination. So the short premise is that you are kind of an agent for the Earth's Society and you're tasked with going to an abandoned mining station on an asteroid, like a big asteroid, and you have to acquire, you have to go and find and retrieve a really rare new resource for them. But over time, as you play the game, you will come to understand the mysteries of why it was abandoned, what happened to everyone. As a heavy gamer myself, of course, this is a very, very opinionated view of preferences that I do like good visual, I like good graphics. Yes, I can play Zelda on my Switch as well. But I also like the graphics of Ghost of Tsushima, beautiful game there. So from graphics perspective, how mature is the platform and how mature is your game? For graphics, graphics is largely handled by the engine, and they've got what they call the Atom Renderer, which is, again, it's easy to, it is pretty simple to work with. As for, in terms of the graphics itself, I would definitely say it's definitely top notch, especially if you know how to work with it. It can be a bit difficult to understand exactly how to work with it, like there are, you know, engineers still in development, there are maybe a couple features that are not quite native yet, but there are also some features that I'm actually glad are there that aren't there in Unity and Unreal, like specifically how they do their lighting system. And if you can use it correctly and well, then your game can definitely look very nice. In terms of our game, it would be pretty difficult for a team of five with one artist to hit the Ghost of Tsushima level of art. So we're focused more on a pretty stylized, like low poly, hard edge, sort of sci-fi looking art style. So it's more or less like, you know, just the way Blender is for 3D modeling, very mature, very advanced, a lot of, so, you know, this open 3D engine is also of the same calibers. A lot of powerful, is that correct? Kind of, we can draw the parallel there, so people can relate to that. Yeah, if I had to compare Unity's native lighting system to O3D's, I would absolutely take O3D's lighting system over Unity. Personally, I do think Unity's lighting, native lighting is a little bit out of date compared to what you see today, especially with Unreal. I just think that overall O3D just looks better than Unity these days. When we look at open 3D engine and if you look at, you know, the other, you know, commercial players, does that, this open sort of nature give you an edge that you can actually move much faster? Because you don't have to really worry about the big organizations, big monolith, big developer cycle, so you folks can move much faster just the way Linux kernel can faster than company. So when the new technologies, new hardware comes into play, anybody can go in there, submit a patch or, you know, a feature. Just talk about the pace of development. I would say that with the pace of the development of the project, because it's open source, I think that a lot of the times it is easier, like the integration of like new features is quicker. Because with Unity, there's of course third-party plugins, but when it comes to third-party plugins, those aren't created by the Unity dev team, those are created by other people. And as a result, that has to go through a bit of a process in order to get like officially onto like the asset store, for example, or something like that. Whereas with O3DE, like I said, there's really, like you can create your own gem, which is how, which is what they call their plugins. Anyone can create a gem that they want, and these gems are modular, they can be integrated in any project. And there really isn't much of an approval process, you can create it, and then you can literally just start, you know, notifying other people in the community like, hey, I have this, this plugin, or I have this gem, and it does the XYZ. Feel free to go ahead and use it if you want, kind of thing. We have been talking about the Rosie picture. Let's look at some of the, you know, challenges when you compare Open 3D Engine, which is related to the new and open source project, versus when you look at commercial projects, what are some of the challenges or pain points that you feel that developers have come across, or you have to deal with? I mean, I think one of the biggest sort of pain points with O3D is just that it's so much newer than something like Unity or Unreal where they've been in development for years upon years now, and then O3D started really like two years ago. So some things are either not there or not documented super well, or whatever it may be. So there's definitely a sort of learning curve at the start you have to get over, but you know, it's really a community thing. So when there's, when you notice like, hey, there's no documentation on this, you can kind of just hop into like the official Discord or wherever and be like, hey, anyone know how to do this? Or like, is there a way we can get documentation up for this so I can understand it? So there are definitely pain points and figuring out how everything works in all the different pieces, but it's, once you're sort of over that hump, it's all good. Can I actually add something to that real quick? Regarding the documentation, you reminded me that that's also another part of the engine that's very easy to, to kind of iterate on, because the documentation is by with, with like Unity and Unreal, those are handled specifically by those dev teams, but the documentation with O3D, sure, it's primarily, primarily handled by the O3D team, but it can actually be iterated on by anyone because at the end of the day, that entire documentation website is just a giant GitHub repository. Anybody can add to the documentation, however they see fit. Of course, there's an approval process with that before they get it in, but the point is anyone can, anyone can, can integrate whatever they want with it. If there's something they feel that needs to be added, then they can add it, and I think that's really nice considering the open source nature of this, this engine. Like, like Jack said, the engine is still largely in development. So with Unity and Unreal, you have these giant forums with a massive communities around them, pretty much if whenever you have a problem with the engine, you can look up, like, you can look it up on the forums, chances are somebody else has had this problem and it's been solved. But with Open3D, there really isn't that massive resource that you have. Like Jack said, you really have, it's a tightly knit community for now, and it's like the Discord server, it's about it. There's also a Reddit page, but again, it's not nearly as much and a lot of the times the problems that we have are problems that haven't been talked about or no one else has really come across before. So what we end up doing instead is we have kind of had to learn how to dive deep into the engine's code and architecture to understand exactly what things are doing. And with the help of, since because of the Nature project Eureka, we get direct access to help from the developers themselves, we can figure out the problems that we're having. Some of the times that they are actual engine bugs, some of the times they are things that we just didn't realize this is how it works. We thought it worked this way, but it actually worked that way. It's been quite the process, not something that we were used to at first, but as we get used to it, I'd say that it was actually a benefit to all of us because we have a lot more experience now with getting to understand software that doesn't have much of a community backing it as compared to other software like it, that is a lot more popular. Why should game developers, it doesn't matter whether commercial or hobby, why they should look at this engine and consider it. I would say, first of all, that the engine has a bit of a steeper learning curve compared to the current ones out there right now simply because of the fact that it's still in development. But I would also say that for someone who wants to get into it to kind of publish something, I would say that considering the resources that are available, the Discord server is actually very nice. Yes, like I said, the community is not as large as the other ones, but you would, as a result, instead, you are a lot more likely to get real help from the actual developers themselves as compared to Unity on real where most of the time, if there's a question you have to, you need to ask, most of the time you'll get an answer from someone else who is also just a customer of the engine. Here, there are obviously plenty of other people who use the engine for their own purposes, but the developers are a lot more active with helping the community, in my opinion. And I think that's because of the fact that it's a bit more closely knit. Now let's look at what kind of developer should look at this engine. The engine is specifically meant for, well, it's not specifically meant, but it definitely was built with the idea of being AAA in mind. So it definitely is, I would say the primary use of the engine, the vision of it anyway, is to be used for AAA purposes, so made used by large companies. I think the idea here with the engine is that a large company would take the engine, they'd fork it, then they'd modify it in whatever way they see fit and then they would use that modified engine to create their game. In terms of, like, that is basically the idea with it. I would definitely say that it's still definitely usable for any other kind of developer as well. Indie developers, like, we're indie developers, right? So it's not to say that indie developers aren't specifically the greatest audience for this kind of engine. As a matter of fact, I would say that indie developers are a pretty good audience for this engine as well. Yes, if only because, like I said, there's a good community around it. The community's not as big, but it's very useful. And that's when you kind of understand, when you get a good feel for the engine, development actually does become pretty quick once you actually get a good feel for it. So somebody can use it to make the next gorilla tag or among us if they want to. Like I said, we haven't actually looked into what the stage development is for VR games. But from what we've seen in the community, people have been asking a whole lot of questions regarding it. And there's definitely support for it. Like, we've seen snippets of people developing a VR. So it's definitely in the engine and people have been doing cool things with it. So if you're coming from specifically the perspective of being a student like we are, and you want to get your foot into the industry and kind of spice up your portfolio, I would honestly say like work on an open source project. It's really useful because in open source projects such as Open 3D Engine, even though we are not specifically supposed to work on the engine, we're just supposed to work on the game within the engine, we have ended up working on the engine directly to get in like some features that we wanted to have for the game. And as a result, at least I can say personally, my understanding of C++ and programming concepts in general has skyrocketed since the beginning of this project. And that might simply be because of the fact that Open 3D Engine is still in development. So when you come across things like bugs and crashes with the engine, and then you start learning how to debug such a massive codebase, that skill of learning how to understand such a big professional codebase can bring you pretty far into the industry. If you're going into software development like I am, I would say it's definitely something that other people should consider looking into working on an open source project. AJ, Jack, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this gaming engine. As I said, I'm heavy gamer myself. So of course, I'll be looking forward to downloading and playing this game on the Steam. And I would love to chat with you folks again whenever you're working on the next game or to just to get an update on the project. But I really appreciate your time today. Thank you. Thank you very much. This was a lot. This was great. Glad to be here.