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MisterOsiris's avatar
MisterOsiris
Community Manager
2 months ago

🚀 Announcing Meta Horizon Engine and Meta Horizon Studio: Next-Gen World-Building for Creators! 🚀

Hey MHCP Creators,

Yesterday at Connect, Mark unveiled the next chapter for world-building on Horizon! We’re excited to share more details about Meta Horizon Engine and Meta Horizon Studio and what this means for you as a creator.

🌟 What’s New: Meta Horizon Engine & Studio

At Connect, we showcased the power of the new Meta Horizon Engine with internally built worlds like Horizon Central and Kaiju Evolution—demonstrating the engine’s capability to enable bigger, more beautiful spaces and smoother game play. 

This engine is built for scale and ambition. It supports more realistic physics and higher player counts, opening the door to deeper experiences that simply weren’t practical with our previous tools, all while delivering better performance.

Built on this new engine, Meta Horizon Studio is our next-generation world-building desktop tool designed to unlock your creative freedom. Some key features:

  • Easily import Games-industry-standard asset formats from popular digital content creation tools
    • USDA, USDC, FBX (mesh, animation)
    • PopcornFX (VFX)
    • FMOD or wave files (custom sound banks, physics-based audio)
  • Great lighting, materials, and shaders
    • Live preview of shaders
    • Full baked lightmap support
    • Template and one-shot VFX
  • Animation control in editor
    • Animation graphs and state machines
    • One-shot avatar animations
    • Blending, partial blending, additives
    • Event triggers on states/transitions
    • Sockets to attach entities to joints
  • Script control
    • Local entities & precise networking
    • Player prefab
    • Multiple scripts per entity
    • Breakpoint debugging
  • Professional-grade performance and flexibility
    • In-editor GUI
    • XAML-based, styleable 
    • Performant, frame-precise HUDs
  • BYO source control
  • Multi-channel publishing
  • Integrated performance metrics into the editor
    • Real-time streaming of metrics for FPS, GPU, CPU, Memory, Physics, Scripts, etc.
    • In-editor or on device traces with detailed metrics e.g., memory breakdowns and per asset GPU statistics
    • In-scene view modes
  • GenAI prototyping & iteration
    • Whole scenes
    • Interactive behaviors and scripts
    • LLM-based NPCs
    • 3D objects
    • Ambient sound
    • Sound FX
    • Custom UI

🔥 Beta Opportunities: Who Should Apply?

Meta Horizon Studio is currently in early development and being tested with select creators. We’ll be expanding to a closed beta in the coming months, and we are looking for skilled, feedback-driven creators to help us shape the future of Horizon tools.

Apply for beta if you:

  • Want to build ambitious new worlds that go beyond what’s possible in Worlds using Desktop Editor
  • Are excited to experiment, provide feedback, and help iterate on new tools still in development

If this sounds like you, apply now for beta access! We’ll invite selected participants as we ramp up the beta and will expand the number of creators over time. For everyone else, there will be plenty of time to get started with Horizon Studio once it’s publicly available.

💬 Up Next

So what does this mean for everyone developing in Worlds Desktop Editor? Keep going! Worlds Desktop Editor remains the primary tool for building and monetizing worlds. With the holiday season approaching—a peak time for engagement—keep creating and updating your worlds to make the most of seasonal opportunities and competitions - including our brand new $2.5M competition (launching later today!).

Next week we’ll dive into more detail on Horizon Engine and Horizon Studio - providing answers to some of the questions we’ve already been asked and giving you the opportunity to ask more. More details soon!

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