There are 2 ways you can get hold of the OGRE source: download a stable release, or retrieve a development version through Subversion.

The source code to OGRE is held in a central repository hosted by Sourceforge, which is accessible by anyone with a Subversion compatible tool (although only registered developers can submit changes to it). If you don’t know what Subversion is, you should visit their website for more information, but it’s basically just a central repository where all our source is stored and updated. You can download the command line tool (’svn’) for your platform, or if you prefer there are graphical tools like TortoiseSVN. You can even browse the repository without downloading it if you wish, or see the latest commits at CIA.vc.

The advantage of getting OGRE from Subversion is that you get the very latest available version, and the updates are incremental meaning you don’t download anything that has not changed. We test our changes before submitting them to the repository, so the code you get from Subversion should work; however, we can’t 100% guarantee that it will be stable on all platforms. I recommend downloading OGRE from Subversion if you want to see the very latest features, provided you are willing to accept the risk of so far undiscovered bugs.

Development Vs Maintenance Branches

There are always 2 ‘branches’ of OGRE:

1. Development (trunk): this is the latest development version where all the new features are being added. This is fine if you want to see the very latest features, but it is inherently the least stable version, and there may be interface-breaking changes going on here. Only use the trunk if you are confident in your ability to handle the odd problem.
   The current development branch is codenamed Cthugha and is in the repository under ‘trunk’.
2. Maintenance : this is the bugfixing branch where the API is stable and based on the last major stable release. Only bugfixes are applied to this branch, and no interface-breaking changes. This is the best branch to use if you want to keep up with the latest fixes, but need a stable development platform.
   The current maintenance branch is called Shoggoth and is in the repository under ‘branches/v1-6′.

Using Subversion

To retrieve the trunk from scratch:

svn co https://svn.ogre3d.org/svnroot/ogre/trunk ogre

If you get any errors about ‘Hostname mismatch’, this is because svn.ogre3d.org is an alias to the real server name, just ask Subversion to accept the certificate.

To retrieve the latest stable release which is named Shoggoth but has a branch name of v1-6:

svn co https://svn.ogre3d.org/svnroot/ogre/branches/v1-6 ogre

You’ll get a folder called ‘ogre’ created in your current folder with the OGRE source code in it. This will be the same as if you’d downloaded a release version (except the API reference will not be built for you, you will need to use Doxygen to build it).

To update to the latest (from inside the ‘ogre’ folder):

svn up

IMPORTANT: If you’re using Microsoft Visual C++, you will still need to download the 3rd-party libraries archive, which you can find in the downloads section, although this only has to be downloaded once.

Using GUI Tools

Using GUI tools is even easier, just point them at the URLs above to retrieve Ogre. For example, in TortoiseSVN, just right-click on a folder, select ‘SVN Checkout’, enter ‘https://svn.ogre3d.org/svnroot/ogre/trunk’ (or another branch path) in the URL field, and the folder in which you want the Ogre source to be placed in the ‘Checkout directory’ (we recommend that it ends with a folder called ‘ogre’, although that’s not required), then click OK.

Again, if you get any errors about a hostname mismatch for the SSL certificate, just bear in mind that svn.ogre3d.org is an alias and accept it.