The main new features are:

New post-effects, such as Depth of field, Volumetric Light Scattering (God Rays) and a Vignette effect

Intel HD Graphics support

Direct import of new 3D formats

Extended localization support

Toolset improvements

More detailed information and links to the complete change log and customer references, can be found on their detailed release page.

It is official now: Ogre has been awarded four GSoC 2012 slots this year! It took quite a bit of discussion within the team to pick our top four projects, but we finally made it and are now looking forward to this coding summer and hope that the students can help to really move Ogre forward a notch.

The selected projects are (in no particular order):

• Improve ands Demo the Terrain System (covered by Xiao Xiangquan)
  Forum Thread: Link
  Student Profile: xiaoxiangquan

• Completion of DirectX11 Render System (covered by Robert Sasu)
  Forum Thread: Link
  Student Profile: robert_sasu

• Volume Rendering with LOD aimed at Terrain (covered by Philip LB)
  Forum Thread: Link
  Student Profile: PhilipLB

• Implementation of Off-Screen Particles (covered by Karol Badowski)
  Forum Thread: Link
  Student Profile: Karol Badowski 1989

Congratulations to the four of you!

Also, we want to thank our three mentors who committed to support the students: Assaf Raman, David Rogers and Mattan Furst. They will assist the students and ensure that the agreed goals are met and will also handle the evaluations Google requests for each student.

Additionally, we encourage everyone to closely track the progress of those projects to help with testing and join the discussions along the project path to support the students and their efforts.

All those parts - highly motivated ans skilled students, very committed mentors plus an active community - should form a great foundation for yet another successful GSoC for Ogre!

So all the best!

• • Depth buffer access — the long-expected option to use depth buffer as usual texture has been added. This feature allows to integrate numerous modern rendering features such as Soft Particles, Depth of Field, SSAO, etc.
  • Soft Particles — built-in Soft Particles technology support based on the new depth buffer access feature. Soft Particles is intended to eliminate graphic artifacts that can appear when particle intersects with scene geometry.
  • Animation Tree System — a new Animation Tree system has been added. With this major feature you can configure animations much easier. You don’t need to write that much code for animation support anymore — now you can do this by means of an animation tree file, which is a scheme with operations and connections. A visual editor will also be added in later versions..
  • Navigation mesh pathfinding — new navigation mesh pathfinding has been added. In addition to grid based and way point navigation systems NeoAxis SDK now includes powerful pathfinding system based on navigation mesh technology. The engine uses the open-source Recast pathfinding system internally.
  • Vegetation material — advanced Vegetation Material has been added. With this material it is now possible to make high quality trees, shrubs and grass.
  • FXAA anti-aliasing — new anti-aliasing post-effect allows to achieve better image quality with less resources and higher performance, rather than when using FSAA or MSAA algorythms.
  • Awesomium — the Awesomium library has been integrated into NeoAxis 3D Game Engine. The Awesomium library enables embedding full-fledged web browser functionality into applications and games. The library is provided as an additional engine plug-in.
  • Localization — the toolset supports localization now and can be easily translated to another language. Russian localization has been added.

They also added a really nice looking, new demo:

While all of those features sound great on paper, the real value of such an engine has always to be proven in real projects…and the guys from NeoAxis proofed again that their engine is indeed production-ready and can be used for real world applications with their latest Success Story: A training simulator for chemical facility employees. You can read more about this “fully-fledged training suite” on their blog entry.

For more details and additional images as well as a video about this simulation project, have a look at their reference customer entry.

For the 6th time, we were accepted as one of the 180 open-source projects to participate in this year’s Google Summer of Code! As you can guess, we are very thrilled about it and are now looking for some talented people to tackle some interesting projects and help evolving Ogre even further.

So, if you are a student and don’t know what to do over the summer yet: This is your chance!

We have put together all relevant information, e.g. on how apply for an Ogre GSoC slot or where to find project ideas in this announcement thread: Ogre GSoC 2012 Guide

In case you have any questions, feel free to open a thread in our GSoC forums section. The same applies if you want to discuss or pitch in ideas you have, regardless of whether you plan to tackle them yourself or just want to help our soon-to-be GSoC students to find their perfect project. All input in this matter is highly appreciated!

We are looking forward to another great coding summer! Best of luck to everyone participating this year!

So, let the summer begin!

BigFly Baseball

“We are developing a fast, light-hearted, atmospheric, and accessible baseball game. It mixes a unique cartoon art style with a simulation that is true to the sport.”
- Co-Founder, Metalhead Software Inc.

The game is driven by a custom made game engine (MetalTech) consisting of Ogre, bullet, Lua, FMOD and CEGUI. They are using 3dsMax for art&animation and OgreMax to export it all (in addition to a great many custom 3dsMax scripts as they told us). The team only consists of three guys, 2 IT guys and 1 artist. Nonetheless they managed to deliver a game that already looks great and fun in this stage of development and they obviously put in a lot of effort into the details like the stadium surroundings (Statue of Liberty, Air Force fly-by, …) and the cheering crowds (find more technical details about their implementation in the showcase thread).

BTW: MetalheadSoftware is currently in the process of striking a deal with a major 3rd party publisher. Best of luck with that!

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