Good news!
Some days ago we finally tagged our official source code repository with “v1-9-0RC1” which of course means to we reached a development state that we consider feature-complete for Ogre 1.9. As usual we first release a Release Candidate (RC) version that – if no major issues are found or any upcoming issues were fixed – will be declared final/stable and then become the official current Ogre version. So please: Wherever possible switch to the new version to give it a try and report any issues you find to our Ogre JIRA tracker so that we as the team can tackle them.

The download section has been updated to point to the newly created Ogre 1.9 RC1 SDKs that can be downloaded by those that do not want to build the new version from source themselves. Otherwise, as usual follow these instructions (you need to grab the source directly from our BitBucket repository since we did not prepare any source bundles yet).

Lastly, the mandatory changelog. We will just list some of the major points here, the detailed list can of course as usual be found in the wiki.

Changelog highlights:

  • New LOD Volume Rendering Component with LOD from GSoC 2012
  • Terrain Improvements from GSoC 2012
  • Android platform support
  • Windows Phone 8 platform support
  • Windows Metro / WinRT support
  • OpenGL3+ Render System (still experimental and under heavy development)
  • Improvements to all Render Systems, e.g. DirectX11 from GSoC 2012
  • multitude of bug fixes

What’s next?
With Ogre 1.9 out of the way we can now focus on the upcoming, major release Ogre 2.0 which will entail a lot of internal core optimizations to get Ogre’s speed up to the levels to be able to compete with other rendering engines. Quite a bit of profiling and brainstorming was already done to get us started. One other big step in that direction will of course be this year’s Google Summer of Code where we will concentrate on those areas (for additional topic proposals see this topic list the dev team compiled). If you want to help, just join into the discussion. We are glad about all the support we can get!