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.

OgreUserSurvey2011.pdf

Thanks to everyone who participated and made with survey such a success!

Your Ogre3D Team

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.

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

Thank you all in advance!
Your Ogre3D Team

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.

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.

Link to survey

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 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.

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.

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!