The last year started with the first release candidate of Ogre 1.7 [Cthugha] which technically was brought together and published in the twilight of December 31st 2009 and brought an explosion of amazing new features and improvements to Ogre.

Amongst the biggest changes and additions, was the new compositor framework, and our new all-in-one Sample Browser Framework from the Google Summer of Code Student “omniter”, along with the new powerful Terrain component, the RTShaderSystem for on the fly shader generation and an official Apple iOS port for the iPhone and iPad, and let’s not forget the biggest change: Ogre’s switch to the MIT licence.

Since the middle of January we got a new official funny and fearless 3D mascot named ‘Sinbad’ also modelled and animated by “omniter” that comes with the OgreSDK and is used in the Samples and throughout the SDK.

“Nir Hasson” officially joined us in February as a new Ogre Team member, after he has been operating as a member of the team in all but name for quite some time. Nir’s work on the RTShaderSystem was introduced in Ogre 1.7.

In March, we switched from the Sourceforge Subversion repository to Mercurial hosted by BitBucket. Through this switch, we gained far more flexibility in terms of distributed development, allowing everyone to easily fork the Ogre code base, manipulate it and merge back changes that may be interesting for the whole community.

At this point in time, we did not yet know how important  this would become, as the Ogre Founder and Project Leader, Steve ‘Sinbad’ Streeting, in the middle of April suddenly shocked us all by announcing his immediate retirement. With him we lost the most active team member that invested a lot of time and strength in the development of Ogre which unfortunately led to his severe health condition that forced him to step back. Yet Steve assured us that he won’t be entirely gone but stop by from time to time as a regular community member and supporting the Ogre Team where necessary to make sure that his great work still carries on.

The start of a busy summer was marked by months of discussion and countless weeks of transitional work, especially from the community members “jacmoe”, “betajaen” and “spacegaier”. In the end it was worth the trouble, when in June the new TikiWiki replaced the MediaWiki that previously ran for many years. We now have a much more powerful tool at our fingertips to share knowledge about our favorite rendering engine.

Approximately at the same time a secret group of loyal long-time Ogre community members and supporters gathered in the hidden areas of the World Wide Web, organizing a special farewell present for our outgoing project lead in the form of a unique metal statuette, again featuring our newly created Ogre 3D mascot. It was the least we could do, to commemorate the efforts of Steve!

Besides all these more or less official topics, there also was a fast amount of community project work going on. Many great and promising games, applications, libraries and frameworks were published or developed further. To name them all would be extensive, so here are a selected few: Alien Dominion, Blocks, CT Visualization, CloakWorks Shroud, Dynastica, Family Farm, Gorilla, Handball Simulator 2010, Hovercraft, Island Hopping, Kromaia, MOGRE, NeoAxis Engine, Nimbus, NxOgre, Ogitor, OgreKinect, OgreParticleLab, OgreProcedural, OpenSpace3D, Particle Universe MediaPack, Proun, QuickGUI, Spacescape, TopGunner, Zen Engine and ZeroGear.

With the so far most highly accredited game title using Ogre, Torchlight, exceeding the 750,000 sold units milestone and therefore probably making it the most widely spread Ogre application, our beloved rending engine showcased once more it massive power that will hopefully lead us in another bright year of 3D rendering.

Thanks to the new source code control system, a great Ogre Development team and our stunning administrators and moderators, we have no worries that Ogre will grow further in the upcoming year!

All the best, and have a Happy New Year!

The Ogre community

So far the source releases are ready for download for 1.7.2, the SDK releases are coming soon. If you don’t want to wait, give the source release a try

Update 8 November: Prebuilt SDKs for Visual Studio 2008/2010, MinGW, OSX and iPhone are now ready for download, as are updated Ubuntu packages in our Launchpad PPA.

Changes since 1.7.1:

• Fix bug 240: TextAreaOverlayElement incorrectly loads Font in background thread (OGRE_THREAD_SUPPORT == 2)
• Report errors if installable DLLs missing (e.g. cg.dll)
  Make sure OGRE_INSTALL_DEPENDENCIES always true
• Fix Cmake error with VS 2010
• Fixed a compile bug – in visual studio 2010 – 64 bit we get this error: “LINK : fatal error LNK1210: exceeded internal ILK size limit; link with /INCREMENTAL:NO”
• SDK build – added vcxproj ext to the batch file – for VC10 support
• Fix a breakage from rev 2133 on systems other than 64-bit VS 2010
  - Cannot pass a blank string to LINK_FLAGS
• Fix an infinite loop that could occur with StringUtil::replaceAll if replaceWhat is a substring of replaceWith. Solved by advancing the string position after each replacement.
• Make sure the correct resource path is inserted into config files when building the OS X SDK.
• Correct the iPhone SDK disc image to use the correct background image file.
• Patch 2979571 by moagames : textures referenced with texture_ref can now be also used as render targets. http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=56671
• Dispose of Carbon window handles when the window object is destroyed. Fixes a problem with old windows remaining visible after the resolution has been changed.
• Removed redundant compositor creation call from deferred shading demo.
• Allow overriding Rectangle2D’s vertex buffer usage, and using this in the compositor’s quads. As discussed in http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=57656
• fixed parsing of matrix types from shared parameter definition
• ProgressiveMesh::PMVertex can list itself as a neighbor after collapsing vertices. This leads to a crash in ProgressiveMesh::PMTriangle::notifyRemoved.
  Changed ProgressiveMesh::PMVertex::removeIfNonNeighbor to always remove itself from the neighbor set.
• fixed destroySubMesh corrupting the mesh if it contains an edge list
• Add OgreOverlayElementFactory.cpp for methods which can’t be inlined.
• Install ressources according to OGRE_LIB_DIRECTORY .
• Support LIB_SUFFIX. Which is the de-facto standard for cmake to support lib64|32 systems.
• Removing a few unused variables to lower the number of compiler warnings.
• GLES: Fixed a crash on texture creation. Added buffer mapping support(port from GL Rendersystem).
• Adding a few missing header search paths to the Xcode templates.
• Adding iPhone 4′s native resolution.
• Xcode Templates: Use devices’ native resolution. Shutdown properly. Add CADisplayLink support.
• iPhone: Adding CADisplayLink support to SampleBrowser. Shutdown the app properly on iPhone and disable the loading bar to speed up loading on iOS 4
• GL ES: 16 bit texture support.
• OS X: When targeting 10.6 only – Fixed an issue with old framebuffer contents being displayed when using non-native resolution full screen contexts. Also fixed a crash when switching resolutions. Added some error checking to the full screen context creation.
• Disabling DisplayLink on iPhone by default, as it can cause input lag sometimes.
• Fix a cross-endian bug in StreamSerialiser::calculateChecksum
  Files written on one endian system would fail checksums on another (even though the data can be converted on the fly) because the checksums were calculated on the raw memory of the header data
  Now always calculate checksums in little-endian
• Endian fix for FastHash – casting to uint16 is non-portable
  NOTE: this will break checksums if you’re on a big-endian machine using files generated before this change.
• Fix StreamSerialiser::REVERSE_HEADER_ID which was only reverse for uint16, not the declared uint32
• OS X: Reworked windowing to fix setFullscreen and provide more robust GL context management
• Adding additional directories to search for the Ogre framework when using a prebuilt SDK with your own projects under OS X
• OS X & iOS: Simplify some post build commands by using wildcards. Updating pbxcp commands to exclude .hg directories.
• Refreshed iOS SampleBrowser icons and launch images
• Adding new iOS higher resolution icons and launch images
• Uncomment the use of the HideOnFullScreen attribute for Carbon windows
• Adding the using keyword to resolve a set of warnings. Also removed a switch for a simple if-else.
• Very minor cleanup from a bad copy/paste in Xcode template installer code
• iOS: Several additions to properly support newer iOS devices including: High resolution screen support, FSAA and Framebuffer discard. A config key has been added to allow you to manually configure the content scaling factor. For example, if you only want 720×480 on an iPhone 4, specify contentScalingFactor=1.5.
• iOS: Fixed the camera frustum and viewport dimensions if the device is in landscape. With this fix, the FOV and aspect ratio will be correct in all device orientations
• Patch 3034005: GLSL writers make wrong assumptions about the precedence of the || && operators (v1-7 applicable part)
• Patch 3034009: navigation bug in sample browser
• Build fixes for MinGW-w64
• (CMake) Properly determine if we are on a 64bit platform
• Allow embedding of Dependencies source build into the Ogre source tree
• Due to a change made in CMake 2.8.1, Xcode based projects for iPhone would be corrupted. This fixes the problem. Also, up the default SDK version to 4.0 since Apple is no longer shipping a 3.0 SDK but still supports targeting it.
• LLVM compile fix
• Patch 3040518: Fix link warnings when compiling Ogre with -fvisibility-hidden
• Updated sed script to work with the CMake 2.8.1+ fix for iOS
• iOS: Cache the system version so we don’t query it every time we call swapBuffers
• Patch 3034010: Reduce a large number of compiler warnings, particularly shadowed local variables
• Backing out use of _OgreExport on AllocatedObject members, causes major build problems on VS
• SceneManager::renderVisibleObjectsCustomSequence was calling firePostRenderQueues at the start instead of firePreRenderQueues (thanks Lacero)
• Fix a script compile error introduced with the warning reduction patch
• Fixing iOS project generation. Running fix_linker_paths.sh may no longer be necessary, especially if using CMake 2.8.1 or later.
• Use RenderSystem capabilities to only load samples that require shaders if we support a shading language when linking statically.
• Bugfix : Scriptcompiler would crash when a specular attribute contained one number.
  As reported in http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=59742
• Fix a bug in Unix FileSystemLayerImpl if resolving a symlink fails
• Fixed animation track exporting to avoid XMLConverter to crash.
• Avoid sending tangent related params to XMLConverter when mesh does not have UV data.
• Materials will now fallback to Rendering Material mode when custom material template is invalid
• Added _tex[#] handlers to material template system allowing the use of indexed base texture binding.
• Improved material warnings for better readability.
• Updated help document on feature additions.
• D3D9RenderSystem: Fixed crash when HLSL compilation failed and trying to log errors but D3DXCompileShader returned a NULL pointer
• Fixed nasty memory corruption in OgreInstancedGeometry, when building the GeometryBucket.
  Discussed in http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=60432
• [3061946] Fix invalid fbConfig check in GL rendersystem
• Fix errors generated from RenderSystemCapabilitiesTests due to missing or misnamed capability keywords.
• GLES: Use _OgreGLESExport instead of _OgrePrivate to control symbol visibility for rendersystem classes.
• pkg-config can be used to properly build a PCZSceneManager application
• Installing OIS dependency didn’t work on RelWithDebInfo with MingW
• [3059963] Fix a slight copy&paste error in PCZSM
• Change required CMake version to >=2.6.2
• [3078774] Convert home path to OEM codepage in FileSystemLayerImpl_Win32
• [3074121] Fix handling of lights for multiple displays in D3D9 rendersystem.
• [3032954] Properly adjust window size in D3D9 RenderSystem to get the desired client size when switching from fullscreen to windowed.
• [3067141] Generate user files with debug paths for Visual Studio 2010
• Change Manual & API license to Creative Commons ShareAlike v3.0.
  Apparently Debian will only accept the 3.0 license and not 2.x
• [3002754] Add OGRE_UNICODE_SUPPORT guard to OgreUTFString.cpp
• [3072166] Fixed a crash on exit when SdkSample is initialised before Ogre::Root
• [3053689] Terrain sample: Add Numpad +/- as alternative key bindings
• Add threading library’s include directory to Ogre include directories in FindOGRE.cmake
• Correctly check for PBuffer support even if FBO is supported in GL rendersystem
• [3043021] Use CMake to make sure that GCC visibility settings are passed along to Xcode.
• [3054042] Fix for two frustums attached to one scene node. Cameras and Frustums should use the name member that they inherit from MoveableObject instead of their own.
• [3003231] Specify default values in StringConverter::parse*
• D3D9: RenderWindow::adjustWindow needs to take the current window style into consideration, otherwise the produced values can be off.
• D3D9: Fixed a bug where RenderWindow and Viewport sizes would not be in sync during a windowResized event.
• OS X: Fix use of macAPI in config files to specify Carbon or Cocoa windowing APIs
• A fix so ogre can run on Ubuntu that runs in “VirtualBox”.
  At the date of this commit – chooseFBConfig was not supported on VirtualBox – http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7195
  Now glXGetFBConfigs is uses as an alternative if chooseFBConfig fails.
• iOS: Build script and CMake updates for iOS 4. Fixes several project creation bugs and includes a warning about CMake 2.8.2 which cannot create usable universal Xcode iOS projects.
• Add some error checking to the Xcode template installer to help alleviate installation problems
• Update documentation on Bone::setManuallyControlled to mention the option of using AnimationState::setBlendMask to prevent scripted animations applying to the bone.
• Patch 3097617: initialise mManager correctly in default hardware buffers.
  Modified slightly to maintain previous interfaces & not break build
• Apply patch 3097617 to the GL ES rendersystem too.
• [3057434] Fix RibbonTrail reset when attached to a SceneNode not positioned at the origin
• iOS: Guard a media dir variable update since we want to preserve the relative paths on iOS
• Remove a couple patterns from the Boost header exclude list. Some headers in these directories are needed indirectly.
• Add missing CMake file to list of scripts to install

• Parallel-Split Shadow Map (PSSM) technology has been added.
• Full support of point light shadows. Shadows are based on cubemaps now.
• Web Player 1.3. Networking support.
• Binaries for 64-bit systems.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 support.
• Advanced GUI features. See video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED_UtcgMNQc.
• 3dsMax and Maya 64-bit versions support. 3dsMax 2011 support. Maya 2011 support.
• COLLADA mesh format support.

For more details, please see their full press release. Congrats on the release guys!

The new wiki is designed to be a richer experience for users and allows for better tagging, hierarchical page structures, better article relationships, and more. You can find out more in this introductory screencast, and we encourage you to get actively involved with this community space. As with the old wiki, if you have a forum account, you can already log in with the same username / password.

This project was promoted and led by Jacob ‘jacmoe’ Moen and has been a major undertaking on his behalf to get the old wiki data across, to restructure and improve on it, and to take feedback from the community as it developed. Big thanks to jacmoe for all his hard work on this, and to all the community members who have helped get it to the stage where we could put it live.

So far the source releases and some of the SDKs are ready for download for 1.7.1, if your SDK isn’t updated yet, please be patient as these will come online soon. Or alternatively, try using the source release, it’s really not that scary

[edit] cg.dll was missing from the early version of the SDKs for Windows, we’re fixing this now, check for updates after 2 May 2010.

Changes since 1.7.0:

• Terrain: Fix memory leak after updating lightmaps
• Terrain: Ensure that imported position is used when preparing from ImportData
• Fix calcMorphKeyframeSize in serializer – there has never been an ‘isOriginalGeometry’ flag!
• Safety checks – use !mSkeleton.isNull() instead of hasSkeleton() when accessing the pointer, since hasSkeleton() determines whether the skeleton name is provided, not whether the skeleton has loaded & the pointer is valid
• Terrain: Fix a delete that should have been OGRE_DELETE as pointed out by harkon
• Focussed shadow camera setup dealt with extrusion of directional light volume incorrectly: – It clipped the extrusions against the scene AABB, which may exclude casters in sparse scenes where the main camera has stopped seeing them or their shadows for a frame or more – It should actually have been extruding the receivers AABB clipped to the camera by the shadow far distance – Focus regions would not be affected because extrusion along the light direction does not widen the focus; in fact the use of the whole scene BB instead of just the receivers BB may have led to worse focus
• ArchiveManager’s constructor should be in source, not header, to avoid link errors if constructed from outside OgreMain (this fixes tests build on OS X) Fix some new/deletes in tests that should have been OGRE_NEW/OGRE_DELETE
• Mark a few more options as ‘Advanced’ to de-clutter the main CMake page. Disabling zip, freeimage, dds etc is definitely an advanced function.
• Patch 2981322 – allow OGRE_LIB_DIRECTORY to be set to install in alternate named directories such as lib64 for 64-bit Linuxes that use that convention.
• Fix for VC10
• Patch 2986452: avoid potential resource group change deadlocks
• Patch 2986446: For ACT_LIGHT_POSITION_OBJECT_SPACE for directional lights, we need to use the inverse of the inverse transpose as with ACT_LIGHT_DIRECTION_OBJECT_SPACE, to deal with non-uniform scalings
• Patch 2986441: MovableObject’s queryLights and _notifyCurrentCamera didn’t take account of object scaling when dealing with bounding radius
• Patch 2986437: auto-tracking update should be after the re-entrant call to update shadow textures, otherwise old tracking state may be used
• Fixed BillboardChain::getNumChainElements when tail < head
• Fix loading of mesh versions 1.30 and before They were picking up LOD loading from latest version instead of fallback in MeshSerializerImpl_v1_4 because of inheritence error
• In Mesh::destroySubMesh, fix up SubMesh name map for the removed item
• If group name on manual LOD level is blank, use parent mesh
• Make PlayPen plugin work on OS X
• Fix bug 308 according to user report – don’t include _mingw.h in more recent MinGW packages
• Fix bug 313: doc build target doesn’t handle spaces in directry names
• Fix terrain rendering on ATI/GL – no support for fp30/fp40 in latest ATI drivers but arbfp1 works
• Terrain morphing was missing from shader when alignment wasn’t x/z
• Deal with CMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES a little better: – Selectively remove 64-bit archs (Carbon requirement) instead of manually setting “i386 ppc”, so that user can still customise archs for 10.6 – Set the default arch if none is specified (Cmake 2.8.0)
• Patch 2977286: Fix support for scene blending operations other than SBO_ADD on Dx9 because caps were not being set
• Patch 2979431: Matrix4::makeInverseTransform bug with non-uniform scale
• Patch 2978035: D3D9 should send a “DeviceLost” message to app-side listeners before a device is reset
• Deferred Shading Demo : Fixed ‘is camera inside light’ test for spotlights.
• Fix problem with picking the right shader generator in TerrainMaterialGeneratorA – Would not fall back from Cg when Cg not available (bad nesting) – Can only use ps_2_0 when not parallax mapping
• Fix memory leak in SharedPtr when initialised with a null pointer
• Ensure libdl exists before linking to it
• Fix install of tools PDBs in debug mode
• Add test for switching full screen modes without reinitialisation
• (Fixed commit) Applied l3fthn4d’s compositor (material_scheme & shadows settings) patch as discussed in http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=56031
• Fix bug 305: Entity::setMaterialName(material, group) calls SubEntity::setMaterialName(material) without group.
• Add the rtshader materials directory to resources.cfg
• Correct case-sensitivity issue with samples media path
• Remove nested parenthesis, not supported on CMake 2.6 (only 2.8)
• Explicitly include errno.h. Otherwise build errors occur if not using boost and threading is turned off.
• Patch 2971821: Fix consistency of inclusions of OctreeSceneManager plugin (important when referenced with relative paths)
• Patch 2971818: deal with missing MinGW header & make inclusion specific to MinGW
• Just make sure meshes are being reloaded in LOD test
• Added tests for manual LOD, seems to work
• Explicitly note in the manual some directives which are irrelevant when using shaders
• Another bad svn:eol-style property
• Fix some bad svn:eol-style properties
• More Xcode template work. Cleaned up warnings. Changed iPhone template to use a NSTimer to make it more reliable at high framerates. Fixed the installer path.
• GLES 1.x patch: fix opengl es 1.1 compilation under windows – ID: 2961527. Thanks Thomas. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=302997&aid=2961527&group_id=2997
• GLES 1.x render system: Replaced a printf with a log entry.
• RTSS: Extended the normal map texture unit settings script parsing caps. Now it can read the filtering type, max anisotropy and mip map bias.
• Patch 2965714: CMake Infinite Loop Fix for OS X using makefiles instead of XCode
• Patch 2968889: fix ExampleApplication loading config files in debug mode
• Fixed some iPhone remnants of the OGRE_CONFIG_DISABLE to OGRE_CONFIG_ENABLE change
• Implement missing wireframe and points rendering in GL ES. Also fixed a typo in a comment.
• Doc fix
• Fix copy & paste error that could cause crashes when unloading & reinitialising terrain
• Fix a couple bugs in the Xcode templates. Added an option to choose separate locations for OS X and iPhone SDK’s. Cleaned up the installer package a little bit.
• Patch 2963406: Deal with negative scale in Entity::getBoundingRadius
• Patch 2963372: Matrix4::makeTransform/makeInverseTransform inefficiencies fixed Reduces complexity of this from 39MUL+30ADD to 18MUL+15ADD
• Must set the OGRE_MEDIA_DIR_* to an absolute path for build folder versions
• Patch 2959565: fix XSI exporter build
• Fix bug 264: problem with Camera::setDirection when using non-fixed yaw and a non-identity parent node.
• Fix bug 299: Sequence of light changes can cause crash because of light hash==0
• Make sure linking or copying media works in non-SDK builds for OS X and iPhone
• Mention that the default material generator requires the Cg plugin
• Fix water sample when exiting & reentering it by making sure mesh is removed from MeshManager
• Update Xcode templates for 1.7 final release
• Profiler: endProfile checks group id against mask.
• GpuProgram: Added init in the contractor to mMorphAnimation and mPoseAnimation members.
• Fix bug 297: Incorrect use of Boost_USE_STATIC_LIBS causes boost library search to fail when trying to switch to Boost dynamic libs
• Changes for building SDK for iPhone
• Should delete .exe not .7z when building SDK multiple times
• D3D9 Render System: Device multi thread flag is used now only when OGRE_THREAD_SUPPORT == 1. This will save us a few cycles in the other threading modes..
• FindOIS.cmake fixes: – Respect OGRE_DEPENDENCIES_DIR (useful if used outside of OGRE) – On Win32 define names of the OIS DLLs so they can be copied from wherever they are found
• FindOGRE.cmake fixes: – Use OGRE_DEPENDENCIES_DIR if defined (external dependencies) – Find media in the OGRE_SOURCE folder correctly – Use a zip file common to 1.6 and 1.7 to detect media (OgreCore.zip doesn’t exist anymore in 1.7+)
• Compile fix for people using ExampleFrameListener
• RTSS: Fixed Normal map point and spotlight GPU parameters that weren’t update correctly.
• Minor tweaks to the demos installer – Nicer defaults – License display (forced to be RTF unfortunately)
• Enable WiX installer interface and allow the user to specify the install directory for the demos Fix media installing Add missing samples.cfg
• Fixed remaining bugs for MinGW SDK and finished mingwsdk.sh
• Fix shortcut errors in WiX setup
• Generate WiX config files and custom task for building a demo installer on MSVC Remove space in OGRE_VERSION before suffix, more trouble than it’s worth even for display strings demomedia.wxi.in was generated using ‘heat dir Media -gg -cg OgreMedia -out demomedia.wxi.in -sfrag’ on a clean Media export, then replacing SourceDir with Cmake variable
• Fixes and enhancements for MinGW SDK generation.
• Merged v9841 into tag since urgent change
• Merged v9841 into tag since urgent change
• In future, use the Windows-mode 7zip self-extractor not the default console-mode one
• Final changes for the OS X SDK. Fixes up all the absolute paths in CMake generated files.
• OGRE_VERSION has a whitespace and version suffix appended; this breaks builds if used as the .so version for shared libraries. Use a dedicated OGRE_SOVERSION instead.
• RTSS: Fixed Normal map and PSSM3 GPU parameters that weren’t update on object switch scenario.

We switched to a DVCS because it gives us far more flexibility when dealing with distributed development, since DVCSs allow local commits for all users and are far more sophisticated at merging disparate development streams, including those which have been ‘disconnected’ from the official version for a while (e.g. user contributions which take a while to develop). Also, users outside the team can collaborate with each other far more easily to create joint patches. For details on how to get the OGRE code from Mercurial, please see our Mercurial developer page.

We chose Mercurial as our DVCS because it supports all developer’s operating systems equally (Windows, OS X, Linux), and because it’s easy to learn when you come from other systems (such as Subversion). We chose BitBucket to host our repository because they allow users to create their own hosted forks of OGRE easily, which encourages collaboration on more complex patches out in the community at large. We’ll still be using Sourceforge for other things such as file releases.

As well as following the new repository direct, you can also follow development as it happens via the following:

• Twitter commit notifications (new!)
• Commit mailing list
• CIA.vc

We’re excited about the extra flexibility using Mercurial will bring going forward, and encourage you to try it out!

So, if you want to follow my tweets related to OGRE, graphics & tech in general, and occasionally some random other stuff, here’s my Twitter page. In the interests of making it easier to find in future, I’ve added a link to the navigation bar on the left too.

Enjoy!

As usual you can find everything on the downloads page, and details of the changes since RC1 after the jump. You might also want to look at the original 1.7.0RC1 release announcement to see the major new features that were added in 1.7.

Source releases and Windows SDKs are up now. Edit: SDKs for OS X,  MinGW, and Ubuntu PPA are now up too.

Enjoy!

Changes since 1.7.0 RC1 (highlights only):

• Fix GPU-extruded stencil shadows on Dx9
• Allow Terrain to have layers inserted / removed at any point in the stack
• Fix bug 254: DXTn volume texture size calculation crash
• Samples tidied up, and some fixes to unloading behaviour in Compositor, Instancing and VolumeTex samples
• Many fixes to FindOGRE.cmake, now much more reliable and compatible with 1.6 and 1.7. Reference SDKs with OGRE_SDK, or source builds via OGRE_SOURCE and OGRE_BUILD paths.
• New SDKs for Windows and OS X created
• Fill in some missed PVRTC rendersystem caps
• Fix resolving some types in OS X 10.5 SDK
• Added validateConfigOptions() call in Root::restoreConfig(). Solves a crash when moving cfg file from one machine to another.
• RTSS: some refactoring and bug fixing
• Terrain: fixed several bugs
• GLES rendersystem bugfixes
• Fix Codec compile when using OGRE_STRING_USE_CUSTOM_MEMORY_ALLOCATOR
• HashedVector::mListHashDirty was not initialised correctly in a few cases
• Null shadow textures should not be dynamic since that means after a device lost they lost their contents, and there is no handler to manage this.
• Prevent excessive logging when texture load failed in ensureloaded/ensurePrepared
• Windows 64-bit compatibility fixes
• Fix problems when using logical GPU parameter indexes which end up needing more space than originally thought
• Fix a problem with .hdr introduced by new FreeImage
• Fix a bug in ResourceGroupManager::loadResourceGroup when a resource changes group
• Added a Character sample featuring the Sinbad character model.
• Add CMake option corresponding to OGRE_PROFILING
• Fix a large number of problems on Windows with establishing the max size of a window and switching between fullscreen and windowed modes
• WorkQueue::addRequestHandler and WorkQueue::removeRequestHandler no longer block until existing background requests are processed, leading to better parallelism
• Fix no grass displayed on ATI cards on GL in grass demo
• Static build now works including all sample browser plugins
• Fix RGBA colours in custom GLSL attributes
• Reduce compiler warnings
• Lots & lots of other bugfixes and tweaks!

So, we’re glad that he’s agreed to join the team officially now – welcome aboard Nir! In practice it’s business as usual, but he has his well-deserved official badge now

Zi Ye (aka ‘omniter’) has been with us since Google Summer of Code 2009, and has proven himself not only skilled in the art of coding, but also skilled in the art of.. well, art! He took it upon himself to create an animated character in the spirit of Ogre, and has clearly succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

Zi has named the new character ‘Sinbad’, and modelled him on a hybrid of our original Ogre logo and that of a certain well-known sea-faring character, whose name Steve Streeting, the founder and project lead of Ogre, adopted as his development & community alias many, many years ago. He has animations for idling (strangely my personal favourite because it exudes so much character), walking, jumping, drawing and putting away his swords, 2 types of attack and, curiously, a dance routine He stars in a new sample where he can be controlled by the user, which  demonstrates character control and also using tag points to attach related items (the swords) to a skeleton.

This will all be included in the next release of Ogre 1.7, or you can access it now from the 1.7 Subversion branch. There’s also a video available of a slightly earlier version of the demo. ‘Sinbad’ is available for free use in other applications too so long as you don’t try to charge money for him.

Huge thanks to Zi for doing this! If you want to congratulate him yourself, here’s his development thread on the subject.