Ogre 2.1 now publicly available (previously dubbed AZDO branch)

Hi everybody! It’s me, Matias aka dark_sylinc!

Time to give a progress report:
At the time that I  am writing these lines, I am making the final preparations for publicly releasing the AZDO branch aka “Ogre 2.1” (still unnamed as of yet). This doesn’t mean it’s ready / finished, but rather that it becomes public, as there has been a lot of development that has been done behind closed doors.

The relevant pull-request and merge can be found here: Ogre v2-1 branch creation / pull-request
The new branch itself is here: Ogre v2-1 branch

You can also follow my current ToDo list on my trello board.

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OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook

We as the OgreTeam are very happy to see yet another Ogre book being published by the open-source friendly online publisher PacktPub:

OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook

In contrast to the previously released OGRE 3D 1.7 Beginner’s Guide which aimed at teaching the basics of Ogre from scratch, this new book takes a different approach:

“This is a cookbook with over 50 recipes offering solutions to common application development problems while creating graphics using OGRE 3D, with explained sample code and screenshots added in. Each recipe teaches you about a particular feature of OGRE 3D.”
Quote by PacktPub

The book covers a multitude of different topics, such as:

  • Creation of minimal Ogre3D applications
  • Creation of Ogre plugins
  • Creation of custom Ogre Resource Managers
  • Various input methods such as mouse, keyboard and speech
  • Object and Scene management (e.g. scene loading from (Land)XML)
  • Light and Material handling
  • Various kinds of animations
  • Multimedia Integration (Video, Sound, Speech)
  • Much more, compare table of contents

More details about the book and their authors can be found directly at PacktPub: OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook

There is also a special deal to get both OGRE 3D books from PacktPub as a bundle with a nice discount. So if your are looking to start with Ogre3D, this might be a way to go. But even if you already have experience with our engine, the cookbook can be a good addition to extend your repertoire of techniques.

BTW: The fact that we just released Ogre 1.8, should not stop you from considering either of the two PacktPub books. With the exception of one or two recipes covering Terrain related topics, everything else will still be valid and applicable to Ogre 1.8 as well!

OGRE Will Switch To The MIT License from 1.7

This is a very important announcement: from the upcoming new stable version of OGRE, OGRE 1.7 aka “Cthugha”, we will be switching to the MIT License. The MIT license is a simpler and more permissive license than the LGPL, which we have used so far and will continue to apply up to and including all releases of OGRE v1.6. OGRE v1.7 is currently available as a preview from Subversion, but will slowly become the new stable version in the next few months.

We arrived at this licensing decision in the last month, and decided to make the community aware of it in advance so you could incorporate it into your plans. After the jump there are more details of the reasoning for this decision, and  answers to some common questions.

We hope this announcement will be received positively by the community, and that the simpler licensing arrangements will provide even more incentive for people to get involved in using and extending OGRE in the future.
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