In a week from now, the next major Ogre powered game will finally be released. We had the chance to get some up-front information and material that we are happy to share here. So what are we talking about?

Garshasp: The Monster Slayer

“This game is based on ancient Persian mythology bringing to life the epic battles of the mythological hero, Garshasp, in the ancient lands against the evil monsters. You play as Garshasp himself, the strongest man in Persian Mythology, in a journey to revenge and reclaim the legendary mace of his ancestors which is stolen by the Deevs. A journey which proves to unlock more significant hidden mysteries. The main mechanics of the game revolve around melee combat, platforming and exploration.”

The game was developed and published by the studio “DeadMage“, with a core team of nine people: 3 programmers, one concept artist, an 3D modeler, 2 game designers, one sound guy and an animator. Overall 30 people were ultimately involved in the process. Together they worked on it for 3 years, albeit most of the time part time, since the team members had to make a living or study at the same time.

The also used quite a range of different libarries to get the game done, most notably: OGRE3D 1.6.2, ParticleUniverse, PhysX 2.7.2 (via NxOgre 0.9), Hikari, Boost (Serialization, Threading), CG shaders SM 2.x, OpenAL, FreeSL, OgreVideo and Theora. The CG shaders were used to achieve per pixel lighting, normal/specular mapping, HDR, shadows, vegetation/flag subtle movements, water and hardware skinning.

As for their overall development tools they used Visual Studio 2008, PIX, 3D Max for character design, environment design and animation along with Photoshop, Crazybump and ZBrush. The 3D content was exported by the use of oFusion and OgreMax.

To arrange the assets and create the scenes, they built their own level editor using native C++ and WxWidgets which proved to be a good decision in the long run. They also came up with an own scripting language for their game designers.

So if you are into that kind of game, you should definetly give it a try. You can grab it via Steam or GamersGate.

For more information or news, have a look at the game’s website.

PS: Linux port is in development and they are even considering porting it over to XBLA.

Here is the recent events of Ogre that happened in the last two weeks:

• Lingfors released a video of his OgreWater, which he wrote just in one night for a presentation in his University.
• So0os announced his Ready-to-Go Ogre Framework for Visual Studio.
• Circus Pomché has been released by Bash Games
• Call for Google Summer of Code 2011 Students Announcement
• A preview of Particle Universe 1.4 was posted by Spookyboo in the showcase forum
• We have started looking for students for the Google Summer of Code 2011, with many promising new ideas already posted.
• Jacmoe has installed a new Kudos system, to award forum users with intelligent and well written posts. He has also changed the user rank system to a include comprehensive list of ranks based off the DnD universe.

That is all the news this time, but our Papercut initiative is still on going and of course we are looking for our GoSC 2011 students, if you feel you have a good idea then write a post in the forum.

If you have any news you wish us to include in Ogre News #4, then you can email us at or private message betajaen or spacegaier on the forums.

Over the last two weeks, there has again been a lot of buzz around Ogre. Here are some notable events:

• Ogre powered game APOX was finally released on Steam.
• Some impressions from the game Aquatic, created by our community member Praetorian for the 19th Ludum Dare competition.
• New testimonial by Compredia GmbH was added.
• Further development for the new instancing manager: HWInstancingBasic.
• Community member SongOfTheWeave published PolyViz, a N-Dimensional Polyhedral Visualizer.
• First preview of the upcoming innovative Ogre based puzzle game called ATOM.
• Great new wiki article on how to implement line charts within an Ogre application by Adis.
• The Final Tank Down was released in the Apple AppStore.
• First footage from the hobby MMORPG Amnov.
• Jacmoe installed automatic syntax highlighting for code snippets in the forums, however some tweaking is needed.

Also thank you all for the papercut entries on our tracker. There are so many, the development team can hardly keep up, but nonetheless keep them coming! Before the next Ogre release they will surely all be integrated…

Every two weeks from now on, you’ll hear a summary of the latest news from Ogre, its add-ons and the latest posts from the showcase forum. These news are compiled by our hard at work team of moderators. However, if you have a special news item you want us to post about, or want us to announce the release of your million dollar Ogre powered game, then you can e-mail us at .