Recently there were several updates around the Ogre infrastructure and ecosystem. This post will outline the highlights for you.

Ogre 1.10.9 released

While this is actually core, there were several updates that also improve the Ogre ecosystem. Maybe the most prominent one is that ApplicationContext will now fall back to the installed plugins.cfg and resources.cfg if it does not find any it the working directory (or any previously searched locations).

While this sounds trivial it means that your ApplicationContext based application will just run ™ – no need to worry about the RTSS resources or where the plugins are located. Ok, to load custom resources, still have to provide a resources.cfg, but in most cases you will not need a plugins.cfg. By default all enabled plugins will get loaded automatically.

Related to this change is the deprecation of SceneType enum (i.e. createSceneManger(ST_GENERIC)). Most of the time it only gave you the right SceneManager Plugin by chance. See this thread for details. Instead you are now supposed to call createSceneManger("DefaultSceneManager") or createSceneManger("OctreeSceneManager") explicitly.

Next, basic tutorials 1 & 2 were ported (thanks to Bohdan Kornienko) from the wiki to the new Doxygen documentation and to 1.10 (ApplicationContext). The code is no longer copy pasted into the page, but rather referenced from a real project that can be built and tested. Obviously the tutorial porting is an ongoing effort that you are invited to join.

Finally the -Wundef and -Wmissing-declarations warnings were enabled and fixed the code. These warnings help us ensuring that internal functions are correctly marked static and that our preprocessor branching is sane.

Of course there were many more changes. For the details – as usually – refer to the github tag.

 

Many addons ported

If you take a look at the OGRECave group on github, you will find many of the addons, that make up the Ogre ecosystem. The ones inside the group, were ported to 1.10. Due to the internal reorganization in 1.10, this allowed dropping lots (like lots) of code: e.g. FindOGRE.cmake and BaseApplication could be safely dropped.

But particularly, the documentation was regenerated and now even correctly references any external Ogre classes. Take a look:

• Paged Geometry
• Procedural
• OGG Sound
• Caelum (Relicensed to MIT for OGRECave)
• Particle Universe

You might notice that some information is outdated or find some typos. Take the chance and and create a pull-request on github. Most of this is just some markdown inside the according repository.

 

Ogre visualisation module in OpenCV

There have been Augmented Reality demos using OGRE and OpenCV for a long time. However the new Ogre Visualisation module, short ovis, provides a far better and easier integration. This allows you to write an AR demo in just 35 lines of code.

 

Webserver migrated

Regular visitors might have noticed some downtime of the Forums and the Wiki. This was due to the migration of our Webserver to Bytemark that are kindly providing us with free hosting. This was quite a leap forward as the old server was still running Ubuntu 12.04 with PHP software versioned at around that time. To me it is a miracle that the server still was under our control..

Anyway…the new server is now running Ubuntu 16.04 with automatic security updates. Furthermore we moved from phpbb 3.0.8 to phpbb 3.2.1 (~6 years advance) and tiki from 6.4 to tiki 15.5 (~5 years advance). Besides better security, this brings us responsive (mobile) pages and emoji support 🙂

Wiki deprecation and addonforums archival

The migration has shown some problems with our infrastructure though. We had an isolated addonforums phpbb instance where users had to register separately from the main forums. However only a few addons even had post from this year – let alone having responses. Therefore this instance was not migrated. Instead it was converted into a static archive.

Furthermore using a wiki for code is outdated by todays measures. It sits somewhere between Github, WordPress and Doxygen, where each of the alternatives offer a superior experience for the respective use-case. Therefore for contributing text, you should consider the following alternatives:

• for tutorial and sample code use Doxygen, which offers automatic code referencing
• for external projects use github, which offers code versioning and issue tracking
• the rest, which is general information, should probably be on the main page for better discoverability

 

IRC channel replaced by Gitter

In case you want to chat about Ogre related topics, you can now use our Gitter channel which replaces the #ogre3d IRC channel. The reason we drop IRC is that nobody of the current Ogre Team has admin access to the channel, preventing us to set-up an archival of the chat-logs or even change the headline. Of course we could have mailed back and forth with freenode, and then request botbot.me logging  – but then Gitter took just a few clicks to set-up and offers superior code referencing..