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.

The year 2011 started with the announcement of our new regular news updates and dedicated front page entries about new creations and events, that we more or less managed to keep up throughout the whole year and also intend to continue in the future. Four days after that announcement we were already able to publish the first of many posts, that time covering the publishing of a new Ogre3D book: Ogre 3D 1.7 Beginner’s Guide Book.

After many news updates listing many of the great new projects that were showcased and announced in the forums, we reached two other highlights in April when we were able to announce that we got 4 great Ogre Google Summer of Code projects approved that would be worked on over the course of the summer and then all came to a successful end in October. We want to take this occasion to once more thank all the students and their mentors for their great contributions, that have alread been merged into the official Ogre main code repositories.

It was also in April, that a new member joined the Ogre core development team: Jim Buck (‘jbuck’) filled the position of Ogre Console Lead and will continue his work in this area.

Yet another important milestone was reached, when in May 2011 we finally released the last maintance release for Ogre 1.7, namely OGRE 1.7.3 [Cthugha] , followed by some more news updates until in July, when we were once more in the nice position to announce a second new member joining the Ogre core team: Mattan Furst.

In August we then started the long planned Ogre User Survey 2011, whose results were published in November. If you haven’t seen them yet, check them out: User Survey 2011 Report.

One of the last major events transpired in mid of November (again ofter a number of previous news updates) with the the announcement of the new release schedule and the release of Ogre 1.8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1). The final, stable Ogre 1.8 release is planned for early 2012, so stay tuned…

Over the course of the year we were also able to cover some great new games that created quite of bit of buzz not only in the Ogre community, especially Proun!, Garshasp: The Monster Slayer and FamilyFarm. Also the highly acclaimed game Torchlight reached platinum state with over 1 million sold copies. Congratulations to all of them!

So, bottom-line is: We had yet another really successful year 2011 with great achievements and contributions in the whole Ogre eco system. We of course hope to continue on that path and are looking forward to more great creations and announcements in 2012!

Hence, all that is left to say for the year 2011 is to thank everyone involved, be it as an Ogre developer or a helpful member in the forums and the chat or a wiki contributor. It is the wide range of different, skilled people and projects combined with the passion we share that makes the whole Ogre project such a rich experience and great success! So:

Thank you for a great year 2011!!!

All the best for the new year,
Your Ogre3D Team

PS: As usual, if you have a new project or see anything related to Ogre that you feel should be included in the next news update or even deserves an own dedicated post, just contact us as described here: Community News. All other contact channels can be found on the Ogre contact page.