It’s maintenance release time again, a new release containing more bugfixes for those using the stable v1.6 (Shoggoth) branch. It’s available now in both source and SDK form at the usual place.
Full details of the changes in this release are available after the jump.
We’d like to bring to the attention of the community that the new book Game Engine Architecture has just been released, extensively covering the practical issues associated with constructing a full game engine. In the book, Ogre is frequently used as an example of how various engine components can be designed and implemented. It covers subjects from OS and foundation systems, resource management and rendering, animation, collision and physics, and all the way up to the game world object model that ties them all together. Target audience includes amateurs learning about game development, college students taking game engineering majors or minors, junior members of industry, and even senior folks who are specialized and want to learn more about the rest of the engine.
The book is written by Jason Gregory, a veteran of the game industry, programmer at Naughty Dog, and lecturer at the University of Southern California, where he runs a game development course which also makes regular use of Ogre. We’re very proud to be featured in the book, which is currently receiving very positive reviews on www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.de, and certainly recommend that you check it out!
While you’re at it, why not check out our full recommended reading list?
This is a very important announcement: from the upcoming new stable version of OGRE, OGRE 1.7 aka “Cthugha”, we will be switching to the MIT License. The MIT license is a simpler and more permissive license than the LGPL, which we have used so far and will continue to apply up to and including all releases of OGRE v1.6. OGRE v1.7 is currently available as a preview from Subversion, but will slowly become the new stable version in the next few months.
We arrived at this licensing decision in the last month, and decided to make the community aware of it in advance so you could incorporate it into your plans. After the jump there are more details of the reasoning for this decision, and answers to some common questions.
We hope this announcement will be received positively by the community, and that the simpler licensing arrangements will provide even more incentive for people to get involved in using and extending OGRE in the future.
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This is the fourth time Ogre took part in Google’s generous initiative. This year we had two great students as our interns.
Zi ‘omniter’ Ye – Zi has been using Ogre for a long time and this is his first project with Summer Of Code. Zi selected to improve the way Ogre looks to newcomers by rewriting our sample infrastructure. He created a whole new look and feel to the demo application. He transformed about 20 single demos with different special keys and GUI to a single beautiful application. Zi wrote a new special tray system for the sample interface and rewrote some of the samples to give them a fresh look.
new sample infrastructure
Noam ‘noman’ Gat – Noam has been a member of our growing community for a few years and this is the second year in a row Noam did a project. This time Noam took upon himself to upgrade our compositor system infrastructure. The results are very impressive and will allow Ogre users to easily create complex compositors effects, allowing clearer and simpler code and scripts. To demonstrate the benefits of his work he created a new “deferred shading” sample that uses his new code.
deferred shading sample
Both students did an excellent job and we are proud to have them as part of our community.
The projects are going to be merged into the Ogre trunk and they are going to be released as part of Ogre next version (1.7) in a few months.
Congratulations to all the students and mentors that took part – and thanks!
We’re pleased once again to offer another maintenance release for the stable version of Ogre, in this case version 1.6.3. As you might expect, this release brings more bugfixes for your v1.6 based application, and you can get the release from our download page.
Full details of the contents of the release can be found in the changelog, which is reproduced after the jump. Enjoy!
We’re pleased to announce that David ‘masterfalcon’ Rogers has joined the team as our official iPhone port maintainer, and general Mac OS X guru. David has done some really great work on the iPhone port, the first version of which is now in the Subversion trunk, so it was a no-brainer to bring him on board.
If you want to try building the iPhone version, there are dependencies on Sourceforge (not in the main downloads page yet since this is trunk only and not stable). Build instructions for CMake should be updated in the wiki imminently too.
Welcome aboard Dave!
We mentioned that Torchlight, an action RPG from Runic Games is using OGRE, and we have some screenshots of it in our Gallery. However, if you wanted to see it moving, check out the video from E3 below, which shows a lot of game footage and also a quick overview of the editor system which will be shipped with the game. Thanks to Travis for giving Ogre a plug during the interview!
This is a quick update just to highlight a few significant commercial projects which have been added the the Featured Projects section of the Gallery recently:
We’re very glad to see so many polished products being made with Ogre; in particular it’s great to see experienced teams coming to Ogre and getting great things done with it.
Congratulations to all the Google Summer of Code students who were accepted this year. OGRE accepted two projects for 2009, as described on our GSoC 2009 wiki page.
Here’s hoping for another enjoyable and successful summer of code for our students and community, and best of luck to all the other organisations & students participating this year.
We’re glad to announce the second maintenance release of OGRE 1.6 (codename: Shoggoth), version 1.6.2.
There are lots of bugfixes as usual in this interface-stable release, see the detail after the jump for information, but in addition this is the first release which officially comes with the static link LGPL exclusion, so that you can static link under the same conditions as you would have dynamically linked previous versions, if you choose to. As usual, you can get the release from our download page.
