OGRE 1.7.0 RC1 [Cthugha] Released!

ogre_17_logoWe said we’d try to get this out before the end of the year, and with only hours to spare we just about made it! OGRE 1.7 has been under development for over a year now, and the time has come to draw a line under it and get it shipped as a brand new stable version. Unlike the maintenance releases we’ve been issuing regularly for 1.6, this release includes a huge number of new features and enhancements, of which the headliners are listed after the jump. Edit: I forgot to mention that this release makes official our transition to the MIT License – we’ve been using it in Subversion for a while so it slipped my mind that this is the first ‘official’ release under that license. So that’s news!

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!

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Noam Gat (‘Noman’) joins the team

We’re very pleased to announce that Noam Gat (aka Noman) has officially joined the OGRE team! Noam has been working with and contributing to OGRE for several years now, and was a successful student in our Google Summer of Code programmes for 2008 (geometry shaders) and 2009 (compositor enhancements). Noman will be continuing to build on the compositor work he’s been doing recently, and anything else he happens to fancy having a crack at.

Welcome aboard Noam!

“Google summer of code 2009” projects coding time is up!

This is the fourth time Ogre took part in Google’s generous initiative. This year we had two great students as our interns.
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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.

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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.

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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!

OGRE taking part in Google Summer of Code 2009

Google have just announced the list of open source mentoring organisations that will take part in the Google Summer of Code 2009, the now world-famous open source internship programme, and we’re very honoured to be included in the list for the 4th year running!

The application process for students doesn’t start until Monday 23rd March, but now we’re confirmed as participating in the programme, now is very much the time to get prepared if you wish to apply for a place with OGRE this year. If you’re interested, make sure you read up on the programme, take a look at our Ideas List, get involved in the community, and take a look at our student application template – that way, when the time comes to apply, you’re fully prepared.

Many thanks go to Google for running this awesome programme once again, and allowing us be part of it.