The new wiki is designed to be a richer experience for users and allows for better tagging, hierarchical page structures, better article relationships, and more. You can find out more in this introductory screencast, and we encourage you to get actively involved with this community space. As with the old wiki, if you have a forum account, you can already log in with the same username / password.

This project was promoted and led by Jacob ‘jacmoe’ Moen and has been a major undertaking on his behalf to get the old wiki data across, to restructure and improve on it, and to take feedback from the community as it developed. Big thanks to jacmoe for all his hard work on this, and to all the community members who have helped get it to the stage where we could put it live.

So far the source releases and some of the SDKs are ready for download for 1.7.1, if your SDK isn’t updated yet, please be patient as these will come online soon. Or alternatively, try using the source release, it’s really not that scary

[edit] cg.dll was missing from the early version of the SDKs for Windows, we’re fixing this now, check for updates after 2 May 2010.

Changes since 1.7.0:

• Terrain: Fix memory leak after updating lightmaps
• Terrain: Ensure that imported position is used when preparing from ImportData
• Fix calcMorphKeyframeSize in serializer – there has never been an ‘isOriginalGeometry’ flag!
• Safety checks – use !mSkeleton.isNull() instead of hasSkeleton() when accessing the pointer, since hasSkeleton() determines whether the skeleton name is provided, not whether the skeleton has loaded & the pointer is valid
• Terrain: Fix a delete that should have been OGRE_DELETE as pointed out by harkon
• Focussed shadow camera setup dealt with extrusion of directional light volume incorrectly: – It clipped the extrusions against the scene AABB, which may exclude casters in sparse scenes where the main camera has stopped seeing them or their shadows for a frame or more – It should actually have been extruding the receivers AABB clipped to the camera by the shadow far distance – Focus regions would not be affected because extrusion along the light direction does not widen the focus; in fact the use of the whole scene BB instead of just the receivers BB may have led to worse focus
• ArchiveManager’s constructor should be in source, not header, to avoid link errors if constructed from outside OgreMain (this fixes tests build on OS X) Fix some new/deletes in tests that should have been OGRE_NEW/OGRE_DELETE
• Mark a few more options as ‘Advanced’ to de-clutter the main CMake page. Disabling zip, freeimage, dds etc is definitely an advanced function.
• Patch 2981322 – allow OGRE_LIB_DIRECTORY to be set to install in alternate named directories such as lib64 for 64-bit Linuxes that use that convention.
• Fix for VC10
• Patch 2986452: avoid potential resource group change deadlocks
• Patch 2986446: For ACT_LIGHT_POSITION_OBJECT_SPACE for directional lights, we need to use the inverse of the inverse transpose as with ACT_LIGHT_DIRECTION_OBJECT_SPACE, to deal with non-uniform scalings
• Patch 2986441: MovableObject’s queryLights and _notifyCurrentCamera didn’t take account of object scaling when dealing with bounding radius
• Patch 2986437: auto-tracking update should be after the re-entrant call to update shadow textures, otherwise old tracking state may be used
• Fixed BillboardChain::getNumChainElements when tail < head
• Fix loading of mesh versions 1.30 and before They were picking up LOD loading from latest version instead of fallback in MeshSerializerImpl_v1_4 because of inheritence error
• In Mesh::destroySubMesh, fix up SubMesh name map for the removed item
• If group name on manual LOD level is blank, use parent mesh
• Make PlayPen plugin work on OS X
• Fix bug 308 according to user report – don’t include _mingw.h in more recent MinGW packages
• Fix bug 313: doc build target doesn’t handle spaces in directry names
• Fix terrain rendering on ATI/GL – no support for fp30/fp40 in latest ATI drivers but arbfp1 works
• Terrain morphing was missing from shader when alignment wasn’t x/z
• Deal with CMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES a little better: – Selectively remove 64-bit archs (Carbon requirement) instead of manually setting “i386 ppc”, so that user can still customise archs for 10.6 – Set the default arch if none is specified (Cmake 2.8.0)
• Patch 2977286: Fix support for scene blending operations other than SBO_ADD on Dx9 because caps were not being set
• Patch 2979431: Matrix4::makeInverseTransform bug with non-uniform scale
• Patch 2978035: D3D9 should send a “DeviceLost” message to app-side listeners before a device is reset
• Deferred Shading Demo : Fixed ‘is camera inside light’ test for spotlights.
• Fix problem with picking the right shader generator in TerrainMaterialGeneratorA – Would not fall back from Cg when Cg not available (bad nesting) – Can only use ps_2_0 when not parallax mapping
• Fix memory leak in SharedPtr when initialised with a null pointer
• Ensure libdl exists before linking to it
• Fix install of tools PDBs in debug mode
• Add test for switching full screen modes without reinitialisation
• (Fixed commit) Applied l3fthn4d’s compositor (material_scheme & shadows settings) patch as discussed in http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=56031
• Fix bug 305: Entity::setMaterialName(material, group) calls SubEntity::setMaterialName(material) without group.
• Add the rtshader materials directory to resources.cfg
• Correct case-sensitivity issue with samples media path
• Remove nested parenthesis, not supported on CMake 2.6 (only 2.8)
• Explicitly include errno.h. Otherwise build errors occur if not using boost and threading is turned off.
• Patch 2971821: Fix consistency of inclusions of OctreeSceneManager plugin (important when referenced with relative paths)
• Patch 2971818: deal with missing MinGW header & make inclusion specific to MinGW
• Just make sure meshes are being reloaded in LOD test
• Added tests for manual LOD, seems to work
• Explicitly note in the manual some directives which are irrelevant when using shaders
• Another bad svn:eol-style property
• Fix some bad svn:eol-style properties
• More Xcode template work. Cleaned up warnings. Changed iPhone template to use a NSTimer to make it more reliable at high framerates. Fixed the installer path.
• GLES 1.x patch: fix opengl es 1.1 compilation under windows – ID: 2961527. Thanks Thomas. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=302997&aid=2961527&group_id=2997
• GLES 1.x render system: Replaced a printf with a log entry.
• RTSS: Extended the normal map texture unit settings script parsing caps. Now it can read the filtering type, max anisotropy and mip map bias.
• Patch 2965714: CMake Infinite Loop Fix for OS X using makefiles instead of XCode
• Patch 2968889: fix ExampleApplication loading config files in debug mode
• Fixed some iPhone remnants of the OGRE_CONFIG_DISABLE to OGRE_CONFIG_ENABLE change
• Implement missing wireframe and points rendering in GL ES. Also fixed a typo in a comment.
• Doc fix
• Fix copy & paste error that could cause crashes when unloading & reinitialising terrain
• Fix a couple bugs in the Xcode templates. Added an option to choose separate locations for OS X and iPhone SDK’s. Cleaned up the installer package a little bit.
• Patch 2963406: Deal with negative scale in Entity::getBoundingRadius
• Patch 2963372: Matrix4::makeTransform/makeInverseTransform inefficiencies fixed Reduces complexity of this from 39MUL+30ADD to 18MUL+15ADD
• Must set the OGRE_MEDIA_DIR_* to an absolute path for build folder versions
• Patch 2959565: fix XSI exporter build
• Fix bug 264: problem with Camera::setDirection when using non-fixed yaw and a non-identity parent node.
• Fix bug 299: Sequence of light changes can cause crash because of light hash==0
• Make sure linking or copying media works in non-SDK builds for OS X and iPhone
• Mention that the default material generator requires the Cg plugin
• Fix water sample when exiting & reentering it by making sure mesh is removed from MeshManager
• Update Xcode templates for 1.7 final release
• Profiler: endProfile checks group id against mask.
• GpuProgram: Added init in the contractor to mMorphAnimation and mPoseAnimation members.
• Fix bug 297: Incorrect use of Boost_USE_STATIC_LIBS causes boost library search to fail when trying to switch to Boost dynamic libs
• Changes for building SDK for iPhone
• Should delete .exe not .7z when building SDK multiple times
• D3D9 Render System: Device multi thread flag is used now only when OGRE_THREAD_SUPPORT == 1. This will save us a few cycles in the other threading modes..
• FindOIS.cmake fixes: – Respect OGRE_DEPENDENCIES_DIR (useful if used outside of OGRE) – On Win32 define names of the OIS DLLs so they can be copied from wherever they are found
• FindOGRE.cmake fixes: – Use OGRE_DEPENDENCIES_DIR if defined (external dependencies) – Find media in the OGRE_SOURCE folder correctly – Use a zip file common to 1.6 and 1.7 to detect media (OgreCore.zip doesn’t exist anymore in 1.7+)
• Compile fix for people using ExampleFrameListener
• RTSS: Fixed Normal map point and spotlight GPU parameters that weren’t update correctly.
• Minor tweaks to the demos installer – Nicer defaults – License display (forced to be RTF unfortunately)
• Enable WiX installer interface and allow the user to specify the install directory for the demos Fix media installing Add missing samples.cfg
• Fixed remaining bugs for MinGW SDK and finished mingwsdk.sh
• Fix shortcut errors in WiX setup
• Generate WiX config files and custom task for building a demo installer on MSVC Remove space in OGRE_VERSION before suffix, more trouble than it’s worth even for display strings demomedia.wxi.in was generated using ‘heat dir Media -gg -cg OgreMedia -out demomedia.wxi.in -sfrag’ on a clean Media export, then replacing SourceDir with Cmake variable
• Fixes and enhancements for MinGW SDK generation.
• Merged v9841 into tag since urgent change
• Merged v9841 into tag since urgent change
• In future, use the Windows-mode 7zip self-extractor not the default console-mode one
• Final changes for the OS X SDK. Fixes up all the absolute paths in CMake generated files.
• OGRE_VERSION has a whitespace and version suffix appended; this breaks builds if used as the .so version for shared libraries. Use a dedicated OGRE_SOVERSION instead.
• RTSS: Fixed Normal map and PSSM3 GPU parameters that weren’t update on object switch scenario.

Here’s their press release:

Black Fire Games is releasing “Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter”, a cool space shooter using OGRE. The player takes the role of a gunner of a ship escaping an alien invasion in order to warn the rest of humanity of the incoming attack.

Featuring beautiful graphics, cool sound effects, great metal soundtracks, very intense game-play, shop after every level, flexible graphics settings to match old and new hardware and much more. Can you survive all of the 6 worlds of total annihilation and destruction, over 1000 alien fighters and drones, with a couple of mother-ships launching wings like crazy? There is a 30 minute demo period so check it out!

We switched to a DVCS because it gives us far more flexibility when dealing with distributed development, since DVCSs allow local commits for all users and are far more sophisticated at merging disparate development streams, including those which have been ‘disconnected’ from the official version for a while (e.g. user contributions which take a while to develop). Also, users outside the team can collaborate with each other far more easily to create joint patches. For details on how to get the OGRE code from Mercurial, please see our Mercurial developer page.

We chose Mercurial as our DVCS because it supports all developer’s operating systems equally (Windows, OS X, Linux), and because it’s easy to learn when you come from other systems (such as Subversion). We chose BitBucket to host our repository because they allow users to create their own hosted forks of OGRE easily, which encourages collaboration on more complex patches out in the community at large. We’ll still be using Sourceforge for other things such as file releases.

As well as following the new repository direct, you can also follow development as it happens via the following:

• Twitter commit notifications (new!)
• Commit mailing list
• CIA.vc

We’re excited about the extra flexibility using Mercurial will bring going forward, and encourage you to try it out!

So, if you want to follow my tweets related to OGRE, graphics & tech in general, and occasionally some random other stuff, here’s my Twitter page. In the interests of making it easier to find in future, I’ve added a link to the navigation bar on the left too.

Enjoy!

As usual you can find everything on the downloads page, and details of the changes since RC1 after the jump. You might also want to look at the original 1.7.0RC1 release announcement to see the major new features that were added in 1.7.

Source releases and Windows SDKs are up now. Edit: SDKs for OS X,  MinGW, and Ubuntu PPA are now up too.

Enjoy!

Changes since 1.7.0 RC1 (highlights only):

• Fix GPU-extruded stencil shadows on Dx9
• Allow Terrain to have layers inserted / removed at any point in the stack
• Fix bug 254: DXTn volume texture size calculation crash
• Samples tidied up, and some fixes to unloading behaviour in Compositor, Instancing and VolumeTex samples
• Many fixes to FindOGRE.cmake, now much more reliable and compatible with 1.6 and 1.7. Reference SDKs with OGRE_SDK, or source builds via OGRE_SOURCE and OGRE_BUILD paths.
• New SDKs for Windows and OS X created
• Fill in some missed PVRTC rendersystem caps
• Fix resolving some types in OS X 10.5 SDK
• Added validateConfigOptions() call in Root::restoreConfig(). Solves a crash when moving cfg file from one machine to another.
• RTSS: some refactoring and bug fixing
• Terrain: fixed several bugs
• GLES rendersystem bugfixes
• Fix Codec compile when using OGRE_STRING_USE_CUSTOM_MEMORY_ALLOCATOR
• HashedVector::mListHashDirty was not initialised correctly in a few cases
• Null shadow textures should not be dynamic since that means after a device lost they lost their contents, and there is no handler to manage this.
• Prevent excessive logging when texture load failed in ensureloaded/ensurePrepared
• Windows 64-bit compatibility fixes
• Fix problems when using logical GPU parameter indexes which end up needing more space than originally thought
• Fix a problem with .hdr introduced by new FreeImage
• Fix a bug in ResourceGroupManager::loadResourceGroup when a resource changes group
• Added a Character sample featuring the Sinbad character model.
• Add CMake option corresponding to OGRE_PROFILING
• Fix a large number of problems on Windows with establishing the max size of a window and switching between fullscreen and windowed modes
• WorkQueue::addRequestHandler and WorkQueue::removeRequestHandler no longer block until existing background requests are processed, leading to better parallelism
• Fix no grass displayed on ATI cards on GL in grass demo
• Static build now works including all sample browser plugins
• Fix RGBA colours in custom GLSL attributes
• Reduce compiler warnings
• Lots & lots of other bugfixes and tweaks!

So, we’re glad that he’s agreed to join the team officially now – welcome aboard Nir! In practice it’s business as usual, but he has his well-deserved official badge now

Zi Ye (aka ‘omniter’) has been with us since Google Summer of Code 2009, and has proven himself not only skilled in the art of coding, but also skilled in the art of.. well, art! He took it upon himself to create an animated character in the spirit of Ogre, and has clearly succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

Zi has named the new character ‘Sinbad’, and modelled him on a hybrid of our original Ogre logo and that of a certain well-known sea-faring character, whose name Steve Streeting, the founder and project lead of Ogre, adopted as his development & community alias many, many years ago. He has animations for idling (strangely my personal favourite because it exudes so much character), walking, jumping, drawing and putting away his swords, 2 types of attack and, curiously, a dance routine He stars in a new sample where he can be controlled by the user, which  demonstrates character control and also using tag points to attach related items (the swords) to a skeleton.

This will all be included in the next release of Ogre 1.7, or you can access it now from the 1.7 Subversion branch. There’s also a video available of a slightly earlier version of the demo. ‘Sinbad’ is available for free use in other applications too so long as you don’t try to charge money for him.

Huge thanks to Zi for doing this! If you want to congratulate him yourself, here’s his development thread on the subject.

January 12th marks the official release date of the PC kart game Zero Gear by NimbleBit! For the low price of only $19.99 you can beat up your friends in 18 different levels, in customizable karts and characters. Play with physically based weapons, earn achievements and compete in many different game modes.

To help get you into the actions with your friends, Zero Gear is also offered in a 4-pack for $39.99. Thats 50% off each copy!

Still not satisfied? Take your friends and try the full game for FREE this entire week! Zero Gear will be free to play on Steam until Jan. 18th! If you are STILL on the fence, lets keep it 25% off for the entire week. Get Zero Gear now or be sorry later!!11!

ZOMG, LETS GO PLAY!! http://store.steampowered.com/app/18820/

Congratulations to the guys at NimbleBit on their release!

As usual, plenty of people have been testing it direct from Subversion for a while now, but even so we’re issuing it as a Release Candidate to begin with. Due to time constraints, we’re also only issuing this as a source release for the moment – prebuilt SDKs will follow in a second Release Candidate or the final.

For those of you using Subversion, the new path for Ogre 1.7 is now https://svn.ogre3d.org/svnroot/ogre/branches/v1-7. Otherwise, you can find the new release on the source downloads page.

Happy New Year!

Here are some of the main new features and enhancements you’ll find in OGRE 1.7:

• License changes
  • OGRE 1.7 is now released under the MIT License
• Compositor changes
  • Allow ‘pooled’ compositor surfaces.
    • Separate compositor instances using the same size & format surfaces can share them, saving memory
    • System detects the compositor instance chaining to avoid problems with interdependence
    • ‘pooled’ has to be explicitly enabled on texture definitions, it is not the default because once enabled you cannot necessarily rely on being able to see all the intermediate texture results (because they can be ping-ponging across shared textures); people may be relying on this
  • Manual switching between supported compositor techniques is now possible on the fly
    • Compositor techniques can now have ’scheme’ names, you can manually switch between supported techniques using the scheme name to drop to different approaches for reasons other than hardware compatibility (performance, alternative tweaks etc)
    • You can keep & share the textures used by previously active techniques so switching back & forth is faster (must use ‘pooled’ option for this).
  • Compositors can now specify if they don’t want to inherit the FSAA setting from the main target for texture definitions (‘no_fsaa’)
  • Compositors can now turn on sRGB gamma conversion per texture definition instead of just inheriting from the main surface (‘gamma’)
  • Cross-compositor communication (from SoC2009 Compositor)
    • Define a texture as accessible from other locations by the chain_scope or global_scope directive in the texture definition
    • Reference a texture from a different compositor in the chain (or in general) using the texture_ref directive
  • Compositor <-> code connection improvements (from SoC2009 Compositor)
    • It is now possible to define a custom composition pass (instead of just quad/scene/clear) in code and trigger it using the render_custom composition pass type.
    • You can now link between a compositor and related code (for example, a compositor listener) automatically using CompositorLogics.
• SceneManager changes (from SoC2009 Compositor)
  • It is now possible to pause a frame’s rendering mid-way (for example, during a callback called in the middle of the process) to trigger a side render and then resume rendering. See SceneManager::_pauseFrame and SceneManager::_resumeFrame.
  • Added an option to manually trigger the updating of shadow textures for specific lights. See SceneManager::prepareShadowTextures. The combination of the two new additions allow reusing a single texture for multiple shadowmaps.
• New Sample Browser (from SoC2009_Samples)
  • Instead of many separate demos, we now have one integrated sample browser
  • Samples are pluggable libraries that can be reloaded at runtime without restarting the browser
  • A simple ‘tray’ system is used to make sample GUI controls easy to create
• Antialising changes
  • Support for Coverage Sampled AA (CSAA) – Dx9 & Dx10 only for now
  • Unified & simplified AA settings
    • on Root’s config options the setting is now called ‘FSAA’ in all cases, and consist of samples and a hint string (separated by spaces)
    • on the miscParams to createRenderWindow you can supply ‘FSAA’ and ‘FSAAHint’. The former is the number of samples, the latter any hinting (e.g. ‘Quality’)
• Light changes
  • Near/far plane settings for shadow cameras can now be manually configured per light if required
  • You can now mask lights out per object by calling MovableObject::setLightMask – a renderable object’s mask is bitwise and’ed with the light’s mask and the light is excluded if the result is 0.
• LOD changes (from Soc2008_LOD)
  • LOD no longer has to use distance as a metric for changing LOD levels
  • LodStrategy can now be set on both Material and Mesh, to either Distance or PixelCount (new strategies can also be added)
• STL container changes
  • All STL containers now use custom memory allocators
• Profiler changes
  • Allow milliseconds as well as percentage view – gives a better idea of absolute fluctuations.
  • Define profiler masks so that profiling can be added to core OGRE but still filtered out by categories (added some simple profiling to test)
  • Hierarchy of profiles is now inclusive instead of exclusive (children no longer subtract their time from parents). This is more useful in practice when doing breakdowns
  • Added numerical indicators instead of a scale with ‘ticks’ since its more useful
• Optimisations
  • Fixed-function light state is now handled more intelligently, leading to better performance with large numbers of objects
  • Shader parameters are now updated more selectively, reducing unnecessary updates
• GpuProgramParameters changes
  • Support added for shared parameter sets which allow you to define / update shader variables for many programs and materials in one place. See GpuProgramManager::createSharedParamerers
  • Use shared_params, shared_param_named and shared_params_ref in scripts to define and reference shared parameter sets.
  • Parameters are now automatically migrated when the program they are based on is changed and reloaded; any parameters which still apply are merged into the new parameters
• Archive changes
  • Archive now supports create and remove of files (FileSystem only implemented for now)
• DataStream changes
  • Writeable data streams are now supported (FileSystem only implemented for now)
• File handling changes
  • New class StreamSerialiser is the new way to read & write binary chunk-based formats
• Build changes
  • Cmake is now used to generate project files, separate explicitly maintained build systems are being removed. See Building With CMake
• RenderWindow changes
  • miscParams now supports ‘vsyncInterval’ option, allowing you to sync to a multiple of the refresh rate if you want (and the hardware supports it)
• Viewport changes
  • Added clear method to manually clear any combination of colour/depth/stencil to a specified value without performing an update.
• Image changes
  • Added loadTwoImagesAsRGBA and combineTwoImagesAsRGBA to make it easier to construct combined normal/height and diffuse/specular images etc
• New Paging Component
  • SceneManager-independent, separate optional component (OGRE_HOME/Components/Paging)
  • Pluggable strategy components to control paging strategy for a section of the scene
  • Pluggable content components to control paging of content
  • Plugggable collection components so that paged elements can be composed or selected between in different ways (e.g. paging many LOD levels within a page)
• New Terrain Component
  • SceneManager-independent, separate optional component (OGRE_HOME/Components/Terrain)
  • Inherently editable
  • Hierarchical geometry batching; batch counts reduce at lower LODs as well as vertex count. At the lowest level of detail, the entire terrain page is a single batch.
  • LOD now adapts in real-time to camera settings (viewport sizes & LOD bias) so you can use the same terrain with multiple views efficiently
  • Skirts are used instead of stitching to avoid cracks in geometry; this means fewer indexing arrangements & lower overall index buffer usage
  • Saving & loading of terrain built in, including loading / processing in a background thread
  • In-built support for splatting layers, configurable sampler inputs and pluggable material generators
  • Support for generating global normal maps and light maps, in a background thread
• New ‘Real Time Shader System’ (RTSS) Component
  • Automatically generate shaders to replace the fixed-function pipeline and to add features such as per-pixel lighting, normal mapping and shadows.
• New Property Component
  • Separate optional component (OGRE_HOME/Components/Property)
  • boost::bind based property system to make it easier to expose reflected properties from your objects
• Threading changes
  • WorkQueue added to accept generalised work items to be executed in multiple background worker threads
  • WorkQueue starts the number of workers based on hardware, or can be told to start a different number
  • Main Ogre WorkQueue is in Root::getWorkQueue. You can also subclass WorkQueue and provide your own if you want
  • ResourceBackgroundQueue now uses WorkQueue instead of using its own queue and can have multiple tasks running at once
  • New focus on data-driven, task-based parallel execution with separation of GPU and CPU activities
  • Boost, POCO and Thread Building Blocks supported as threading back-ends (Boost preferred)
• Resource changes
  • ResourcePool added as a place for other application components to shelve & re-use resources
• Material changes
  • scene_blend_op and separate_scene_blend_op added to passes, to change the default ‘+’ operator between source & dest blending params
  • Material listeners can now register to listen to a specific scheme, to allow for none-competing scheme handlers for different schemes.
• iPhone OS port
  • Synced GLESRenderSystem with GLRenderSystem and added some more extension detection
  • Added support for ARM architecture and CPU feature detection
  • iPhone OGRE SDK disc image and sdk package script
• OS X improvements
  • Moved code and resources from the Mac directory to OgreMain
  • Eliminated deprecation warnings when targeting Mac OS X 10.5/10.6
  • General organisation and compatibility improvements