With yet another successful Ogre year coming to an end, it is once again time to look back and remember some of the great things that happened in the Ogre community in 2011. But since we started more or less exactly one year ago with regular news updates, we won’t compose a list here with everything that transpired, as that would go beyond the scope of this news entry and to be honest would be rather redundant. Instead we will only mention some of the most important events and apologize in advance if we should miss something. It is not ill-intentioned, but just so hard to pick just a few remarkable events.
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?
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Ogre 3D 1.7 Beginners Guide
makes it super easy for you to make your own monsters, spaceship shooters, weapons, enemies, and more! This book will teach you to develop 3D applications that are exciting and interesting and if used correctly can result in stunning games and simulations. You will start from the very beginning and then work your way up to complex scenes and stunning effects.
Happy New Year 2012!
January 1st, 2012User Survey 2011 Report
November 13th, 2011It has been quite some time since end of August the Ogre3D User Survey 2001 was closed, so we are happy to finally be able to release the survey report. The report itself does not comment or interprate the results, but is just a mere aggregated representation of the information. The discussion itself will take place at the forums.
Thanks to everyone who participated and made with survey such a success!
Your Ogre3D Team
Ogre 1.8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1)
November 13th, 2011As Ogre 1.8 is due end of this year, it is finally time to get the release candidate versions out in the open for general testing to iron out any last quirks before the official release . As a first step we released the RC1 today.
The source code can either be downloaded from our official BitBucket repository or directly from the Ogre Source Download page.
If you should encounter any issues, please feel free to report them on our bug tracker and discuss them in the “Developer talk” forum section. More information can be found here.
Thank you for your support in advance!
PS: A detailed change log will be provided upon official release.
Ogre News #13
October 3rd, 2011It has been quite some time since we came around posting another news flash. We are sorry for that, but let’s focus on the bright side: This one is going to be a huge post 
. So here it goes:
- Project Aftershock released some new amazing screenshots
- The commercial game “Heavy Hogur – Dwarf Puzzler!” has been released
- Assaf Raman ported Ogre to Google’s Native Client (NaCl) along with a nice guide and a demo
- The commercial game “Garshasp – The Monster Slayer” got video coverage on BBC News
- The “Run3 game engine” using Ogre specifically for FPS-type games was showcased
- First demo for the game “The long way” utilizing the above mentioned “Run3 game engine” was released
- Marble Madness clone (Atari) called “YAMM – Yet another Marble Madness” created by a team of the Braunschweig University of Technology was released
- OgreSpeedTree has been discountinued, but source code is still available through your IDV SpeedTree representative
- Nice little game called “Stained” has been announced
- New volumetric terrain implementation as part of a bachelor paper was showcased
- Integration of berklium + jsLINB was showcased
- Online FPS engine called “SilverTech Engine” was previewed
- The first person tower defense game named FPTD was released
- Screenshots of the Ogre-rendered movie “Turin – Before the city” were released
- The creation of the space epic “Salvation Prophecy” is reaching its final phase by showcasing some new impressions
- New Ogre particle editor called “Ogre Particle Lab” was released
- EZPhysics library was updated to work with Ogre 1.x versions
- New version of the Ogre-powered 3D music player MMiX.Me was released
- The Jade:DS games distribution platform was successfully launched with three Ogre powered games
- A new version of OpenSpace3D with a lot of new features was released
Additionally: All Google Summer of Code projects have been completed successfully and all changes have already been merged into the official Ogre code repositories.
We as the Ogre team have also started preparing a new release, namely a first RC for Ogre 1.8 and we plan to publish the final stable version right on the turn of the year. More information can be found in this thread.
Cheers,
Your Ogre3D team
Last chance to participate in Ogre User Survey 2011
August 28th, 2011The before mentioned Ogre User Survey 2011 will close on the 31th of August, so if you haven’t participated yet, please consider doing so in the next few days. It will only take some minutes of your time, but is of great value for our team and community to steer the future development.
Thank you all in advance!
Your Ogre3D Team
Ogre News #12
August 11th, 2011It has been over a month since the last update, so it is definitely time for a new one. We got quite some requests, so the list is rather long this time:
- OGS Majong got a new update, adding new features as well as fixing some bugs
- First version of the capture-the-flag-type-game Nina Flag was released
- A nice little puzzle game called Magick Brick, which was created at the Shanghai game-jam, was showcased
- The WIP visual shader editor as part of the Alimer Game Engine was demonstrated in a video
- Ogre Meshy v.13 was released
- The upcoming Particle Universe v1.5 was previewed
- New iteration of the space simulation project Void Destroyer was showcased
- The promising Victory: The Age of Racing team announced the close beta phase and showcased their last E3 trailer
- Lumen Digital released a video showing one of their Ogre and Kinect based simulations
- Ogre Procedural got extended by great new features such as SVG support
- A first version of an adaption of the multi modeling format converter Assimp named OgreAssimpConverter was released by jacmoe
- metaldev released a series of great video tutorials, explaining how to create models in Maya for the LFA Scene Manager
- The VDrift and Ogre based game Stund Rally reached version v1.2 and released some new in-game videos
- Two great new wiki articles covering two different phong shader (one with cube and one with sphere mapping) were created by toglia
- A first preview of the virtual fitting room project called FitNect was released
Aditionally: Still a lot is going on in our four Google Summer of Code projects. If you are interested, check this dedicated subforum area.
Also, please participate in our Ogre User Survey 2011, if you haven’t already. The survey is still running until the 31th of August. Afterwards, we will then publish the results.
Ogre User Survey 2011
August 2nd, 2011Those of you who have been around Ogre for some time might remember that back in 2008, we conducted a survey about our user base. The results of which can be found here.
We now decided that after three years it might be a good idea to re-assess our current situation by another, more extensive survey. It is similar to the original one (since we included the old questions to be able to compare the results), but the survey also contains a bunch of new ones to take new developments such as Ogre usage on mobile devices into account.
So for the next four weeks until the 31th of August, you have the chance to participate and help us to get an impression about our user base, how Ogre is used and share some wishes for the future. Simply follow the link, answer the math question correctly (but only if you are not a bot 
) and make your way through the 20 questions. It should not take up much time since most of the questions are simple checkbox or radio button questions.
We want to thank you all upfront for helping us to develop Ogre further and getting some valuable insight information about the people using the engine!
Best wishes,
Your Ogre team
PS: We would be glad if you could spread the word about the survey via all available channels to all potential Ogre users, because: The more participants, the more accurate are the results of course…
Mattan Furst joins the team!
July 14th, 2011
We are very happy to welcome another very talented programmer in the lines of our Ogre team: Mattan Furst. To some extend he already was considered a part of it, but now we made it official. Congratulations!
Mattan joined the team in July 2011. He has a master’s degree in computer science. After playing computer games for many years as a child, Mattan was inspired to seek his fortune in the field of computer graphic. He currently works as a senior programmer in the international SimiGon group, part of the team building the company’s 3D engine. Mattan contributes his time in Ogre as a general code maintainer.
Proun!
July 11th, 2011Many of you might already heard of the fantastic game Joost van Dongen released some weeks ago: Proun. We of course have too and it definitely deserve a mention here…
The whole game was created by Joost van Dongen, except for the sound effects and the music production, which were done by Arno Landsbergen on the basis of Joost’s own compositions. In “normal” life he is the lead programmer at Ronimo Games, an indie game developer known for Swords & Soldiers (PS3/Wii/PC/Mac/iPhone/iPad), De Blob (PC) and Awesomenauts (PS3/Xbox360).
A lot of insight information mainly regarding the development history and artistic aspects of his creation, were already spread via his blog, which we highly recommend if you are interested in some details. But here are some additional more technical corner points he kindly shared with us:
- created in C++ using Visual Studio 2005
- shaders coded in Cg using Context
- levels in 3dsmax using a combination of the old Maxscript 3dsmax Ogre exporter and own exporters and plugins
- textures were created in Photoshop
- lightmaps were baked using Vray
- ODE was used for collision detection
- Irrklang provided the sound foundations
- highscores are realized with the help of RakNet
The game can directly be purchased via the game’s website on a “pay-what-you-want”-basis.
Ogre News #11
July 8th, 2011It has been a while since our last news summary post…sorry for that. But on the bright side: It makes this one a lot bigger than usual, so enjoy!
- first version of Bloom editor, a 3D text editor was showcased
- animationsinstitue.de showed some impressions from their Emote Messaging System, that can be used to created individual, animated short messages to share with friends
- early screenshots from the platform game Bombs&Penguins were released
- beta pictures of the ambitous game Battle Tiers Invasion were shared
- the Ogre AntTweakBar plugin TwOgre was updated to work with Linux
- metaldev updated his GUI library buttonGUI as well has as his LFA Scene Manager
- updated version of the game GraLL2 was published
- Lightwave to Ogre exporter was updated by spacegaier to work with LW 9.6 and LW 10
- teaser video of Will of Nature, a really nice school project from the Netherlands, was released
- first ingame footage from the German MMORPG Espadon Online was published
- NeoAxis game engine reached their 1.0 milestone
- Oogst finally released his long awaited game Proun, that got a great deal of buzz on the internet – dedicated post with some additional information will follow soon
In addition, there is a lot of progress with our four Google Summer of Code projects. Check the out in this subforum.
And the breaking news is: The highly acclaimed Ogre based game Torchlight went platinum as they sold more than 1 million copies. Congratulations!
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