Since 2001, OGRE has grown to become one of
the most popular open-source graphics rendering engines, and has been
used in a large number of production projects,
in such diverse areas as games, simulators, educational software,
interactive art, scientific visualisation, and others. You can read what other people have said about it, and it's free, so why not try it out?
OgreSpeedTree
allows you to use the market-leading foliage system SpeedTree® in your
OGRE projects with the minimum fuss. Simple to use, fast and seamlessly
integrated via a familiar API structure, this is the perfect solution
for those seeking top-quality trees, bushes, grass and other natural
features in their applications, today. Free trial versions available on
request.
The new wiki is designed to be a richer experience for users and allows for better tagging, hierarchical page structures, better article relationships, and more. You can find out more in this introductory screencast, and we encourage you to get actively involved with this community space. As with the old wiki, if you have a forum account, you can already log in with the same username / password.
This project was promoted and led by Jacob ‘jacmoe’ Moen and has been a major undertaking on his behalf to get the old wiki data across, to restructure and improve on it, and to take feedback from the community as it developed. Big thanks to jacmoe for all his hard work on this, and to all the community members who have helped get it to the stage where we could put it live.
We’re happy to announce the first maintenance release to the new 1.7 stable branch (codenamed ‘Cthugha’), delivering as per usual a plethora of bug fixes which you can find a list of after the jump. As you would expect there are no feature changes or API breakage in this release – we save those for the unstable development branch – which of course you can grab from Mercurial if you want to join us on the bleeding edge.
So far the source releases and some of the SDKs are ready for download for 1.7.1, if your SDK isn’t updated yet, please be patient as these will come online soon. Or alternatively, try using the source release, it’s really not that scary
[edit] cg.dll was missing from the early version of the SDKs for Windows, we’re fixing this now, check for updates after 2 May 2010.
We’re happy to pass on the news that Black Fire Games are releasing their title “Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter” today, which includes some lovely space scenes rendered using OGRE. We particularly like their explosions
Here’s their press release:
Black Fire Games is releasing “Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter”, a cool space shooter using OGRE. The player takes the role of a gunner of a ship escaping an alien invasion in order to warn the rest of humanity of the incoming attack.
Featuring beautiful graphics, cool sound effects, great metal soundtracks, very intense game-play, shop after every level, flexible graphics settings to match old and new hardware and much more. Can you survive all of the 6 worlds of total annihilation and destruction, over 1000 alien fighters and drones, with a couple of mother-ships launching wings like crazy? There is a 30 minute demo period so check it out!
OGRE has now switched its main repository hosting from Subversion to Mercurial, a distributed revision control system (DVCS). From now on, if you want to keep up with the latest code that OGRE developers are working on, you need to be using Mercurial too.
We switched to a DVCS because it gives us far more flexibility when dealing with distributed development, since DVCSs allow local commits for all users and are far more sophisticated at merging disparate development streams, including those which have been ‘disconnected’ from the official version for a while (e.g. user contributions which take a while to develop). Also, users outside the team can collaborate with each other far more easily to create joint patches. For details on how to get the OGRE code from Mercurial, please see our Mercurial developer page.
We chose Mercurial as our DVCS because it supports all developer’s operating systems equally (Windows, OS X, Linux), and because it’s easy to learn when you come from other systems (such as Subversion). We chose BitBucket to host our repository because they allow users to create their own hosted forks of OGRE easily, which encourages collaboration on more complex patches out in the community at large. We’ll still be using Sourceforge for other things such as file releases.
As well as following the new repository direct, you can also follow development as it happens via the following:
I’ve linked my Twitter account from the OGRE Team page for a while now, but I’ve been told that’s not really obvious enough!
So, if you want to follow my tweets related to OGRE, graphics & tech in general, and occasionally some random other stuff, here’s my Twitter page. In the interests of making it easier to find in future, I’ve added a link to the navigation bar on the left too.
We’re very pleased to announce that OGRE 1.7.0 (Cthugha) has now been released, this version is now considered to be our stable release branch.
As usual you can find everything on the downloads page, and details of the changes since RC1 after the jump. You might also want to look at the original 1.7.0RC1 release announcement to see the major new features that were added in 1.7.
Source releases and Windows SDKs are up now. Edit: SDKs for OS X, MinGW, and Ubuntu PPA are now up too.
We’re pleased to announce that Nir Hasson has joined the OGRE Team! Now, those of you who have been in the community for a while all know Nir anyway, and also know that he’s been contributing code directly for a while, particularly his RTShaderSystem component for generating shaders which made its debut in Ogre 1.7. As such, he’s been operating as a member of the team in all but name for some time, and he’s only held off accepting an official badge because his plans for the immediate future were uncertain.
So, we’re glad that he’s agreed to join the team officially now – welcome aboard Nir! In practice it’s business as usual, but he has his well-deserved official badge now
Ogre’s been going for almost 10 years now, and in all this time we’ve never had an official mascot character. Well, now we do!
Zi Ye (aka ‘omniter’) has been with us since Google Summer of Code 2009, and has proven himself not only skilled in the art of coding, but also skilled in the art of.. well, art! He took it upon himself to create an animated character in the spirit of Ogre, and has clearly succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.
Zi has named the new character ‘Sinbad’, and modelled him on a hybrid of our original Ogre logo and that of a certain well-known sea-faring character, whose name Steve Streeting, the founder and project lead of Ogre, adopted as his development & community alias many, many years ago. He has animations for idling (strangely my personal favourite because it exudes so much character), walking, jumping, drawing and putting away his swords, 2 types of attack and, curiously, a dance routine He stars in a new sample where he can be controlled by the user, which demonstrates character control and also using tag points to attach related items (the swords) to a skeleton.
This will all be included in the next release of Ogre 1.7, or you can access it now from the 1.7 Subversion branch. There’s also a video available of a slightly earlier version of the demo. ‘Sinbad’ is available for free use in other applications too so long as you don’t try to charge money for him.
Huge thanks to Zi for doing this! If you want to congratulate him yourself, here’s his development thread on the subject.
This week marks the release of Zero Gear, the fun kart-racing game from NimbleBit that uses Ogre for rendering. Here’s their press release:
January 12th marks the official release date of the PC kart game Zero Gear by NimbleBit! For the low price of only $19.99 you can beat up your friends in 18 different levels, in customizable karts and characters. Play with physically based weapons, earn achievements and compete in many different game modes.
To help get you into the actions with your friends, Zero Gear is also offered in a 4-pack for $39.99. Thats 50% off each copy!
Still not satisfied? Take your friends and try the full game for FREE this entire week! Zero Gear will be free to play on Steam until Jan. 18th! If you are STILL on the fence, lets keep it 25% off for the entire week. Get Zero Gear now or be sorry later!!11!
We said we’d try to get this out before the end of the year, and with only hours to spare we just about made it! OGRE 1.7 has been under development for over a year now, and the time has come to draw a line under it and get it shipped as a brand new stable version. Unlike the maintenance releases we’ve been issuing regularly for 1.6, this release includes a huge number of new features and enhancements, of which the headliners are listed after the jump. Edit: I forgot to mention that this release makes official our transition to the MIT License – we’ve been using it in Subversion for a while so it slipped my mind that this is the first ‘official’ release under that license. So that’s news!
As usual, plenty of people have been testing it direct from Subversion for a while now, but even so we’re issuing it as a Release Candidate to begin with. Due to time constraints, we’re also only issuing this as a source release for the moment – prebuilt SDKs will follow in a second Release Candidate or the final.
OgreSpeedTree
We’re happy to announce the first maintenance release to the new 1.7 stable branch (codenamed ‘Cthugha’), delivering as per usual a plethora of bug fixes which you can find a list of after the jump. As you would expect there are no feature changes or API breakage in this release – we save those for the unstable development branch – which of course you can grab from 
OGRE has now switched its main repository hosting from Subversion to 
Ogre’s been going for almost 10 years now, and in all this time we’ve never had an official mascot character. Well, now we do! 
