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Release Notes for Open 3D Engine 23.10.1

The Open 3D Engine (O3DE) 23.10.1 fully implements Prefab Overrides and the Document Property Editor (DPE), enabling these by default. The release also simplifies steps for exporting packages, fixes crashes in the Material Canvas, implements Asset Browser optimizations to improve editor startup times in projects with large numbers of assets (e.g. several thousand assets), and ROS2 gem and Robotics Templates bug fixes and improvements.

Highlights

Here are some highlights of O3DE 23.10.1, followed by a detailed list of features broken down by Special Interest Group (SIG).

  1. Prefab Overrides: Prefab Overrides are now enabled by default. Addressed several stability, usability, and performance issues.

  2. Materials and shaders:

  • Material canvas stability improvements, usability fixes, and configuration settings.
  • Material canvas base and standard PBR nodes now use the material pipeline system to share shader code, generate fewer files, and look closer to the original material types. Material graph files will not need to be updated but users might need to delete previously generated material and shader files and let material canvas create new ones. It might take longer to process assets and update previews depending on how many material pipelines, platforms, and RHI are enabled. These can be configured in project and asset processor registry settings.
  • Fixed material and shader builder warnings, errors, dependency tracking, and problems with consistent reloading that affected iterating on shaders and material types in and out of material canvas.
  • Material component generate source materials feature now tracks and displays progress for generated materials to ensure that assets are ready before assigning them. This would previously print several warning messages when assigning unprocessed materials.
  • Material component, instance editor, and generate source materials have been fixed to reference original source material types instead of generated files in the intermediate asset folder.
  • The Atom instance database and instance id classes were updated with better support for tracking specific versions of assets so that new instances can be easily created when assets reload.
  1. Improved Editor Load Times: Users with large asset databases have had issues with long startup times in the main editor. These changes add some high level optimizations, caching various values, replacing vectors and linear searches with unordered sets, removing seemingly unnecessary recursion, and other changes.

  2. VS 2022 MSVC 14.38 toolset build fixes (VS2022 17.8.x series): QT library is using Microsoft extension for stdext::checked_array_iterator which has been deprecated as part of the MSVC compiler 14.38 toolset.

  3. Improved Terrain feature stability: Resolved several issues with crashes in the terrain system.

  4. ROS2 and Robotics Templates bug fixes and improvements:

  • Improved spawn points reflection and handling during Robot Import .
  • Made adjustments to the Robot Importer to better handle nested SDFs and OBJ meshes.
  • Transform broadcasting is now much faster, resulting in even better performance of multi-robot simulations.
  • Enhanced the user experience with robotics project templates by updating readmes and preview images.
  • Optimized ROS 2 transform frame publishing.
  1. Added support for the Android Gradle plugin 8.1+: Enable support for generating Android projects for Gradle 8.0+ and the Android Gradle Plugin 8.1+

PR’s for point release

o3de-extras PR’s: