by Pavel Rojtberg | Mar 20, 2018 | News
During the period of Feb 7. – March 7. we received 117 replies. At the same time the ogre 1.10 Windows SDK alone was downloaded 5161 times. So while the results are significant, they are probably not representative.
The average Ogre application is a Game displaying Overlays and Particles. It was written as a Hobby in C++ and targets Windows 10 using OpenGL.
As you see statistics are lies, so better take a look at the actual numbers yourself.
To spare you reading all the free-form answers though, here is a summary
Most severe drawbacks of Ogre 1.10
- lack of documentation (8x)
- Difficult to build/ setup (6x)
- code quality/ readability (5x)
- outdated documentation (4x)
- Performance (4x)
- Compositor Component (2x)
- no/ bad scene editor (2x)
- diverging 1.x and 2.x branches (2x)
- lack of art/ asset pipeline (2x)
- Abandoned Plugins (2x)
- “next-gen” graphics (1x)
Most important future change for Ogre 1.11
- modern rendering techniques (8x)
- Keeping code stable (7x)
- Archive out of date documentation (2x)
- more support for existing Addons/ Plugins (2x)
- simplify SCM (2x)
- C++11 Support (2x)
- VR & Stereo Rendering (1x)
As you can see some of the requests are contradicting and some are only vague, like “next-gen graphics”.
To others I wrote a short reply here.
To streamline the development process & discussion of Ogre 1.x, we now have the Ogre evolution proposals.
Basically it consists of a structured textual specification similar to the Python PEPs. Click on the link above to learn more.
by Pavel Rojtberg | Feb 7, 2018 | News
Those of you who have been around Ogre for some time might remember that back in 2011, we conducted a survey about our user base. The results of which can be found here.
As we have started the 1.11 development cycle we would like to assess to correctly emphasize the development and ideally drop some barely used features that will free resources for more important things.
So for the next four weeks until the 7th of March, you have the chance to participate and help us to get an impression about our user base, how Ogre is used and share some wishes for the future. Simply follow the link and make your way through the 11 questions. It should not take up much time since most of the questions are simple checkbox or radio button questions.
Link to survey
We want to thank you all upfront for helping us to develop Ogre further and getting some valuable insight information about the people using the engine!
PS: We would be glad if you could spread the word about the survey via all available channels to all potential Ogre users, because: The more participants, the more accurate are the results of course.
by Pavel Rojtberg | Dec 31, 2017 | News
The 1.10.11 release marks the final (planned) release for the 1.10 series and kicks off the 1.11 cycle that will allow us to break the API. As announced in the mid-term report we will use this to move to C++11 and drop some of the deprecated functionality.
But the 1.10.11 release has also some highlights on its own, namely
(more…)
by Pavel Rojtberg | Nov 7, 2017 | News
Recently there were several updates around the Ogre infrastructure and ecosystem. This post will outline the highlights for you.
Ogre 1.10.9 released
While this is actually core, there were several updates that also improve the Ogre ecosystem. Maybe the most prominent one is that ApplicationContext will now fall back to the installed plugins.cfg and resources.cfg if it does not find any it the working directory (or any previously searched locations).
While this sounds trivial it means that your ApplicationContext based application will just run ™ – no need to worry about the RTSS resources or where the plugins are located. Ok, to load custom resources, still have to provide a resources.cfg, but in most cases you will not need a plugins.cfg. By default all enabled plugins will get loaded automatically.
Related to this change is the deprecation of SceneType enum (i.e. createSceneManger(ST_GENERIC)). Most of the time it only gave you the right SceneManager Plugin by chance. See this thread for details. Instead you are now supposed to call createSceneManger("DefaultSceneManager") or createSceneManger("OctreeSceneManager") explicitly.
Next, basic tutorials 1 & 2 were ported (thanks to Bohdan Kornienko) from the wiki to the new Doxygen documentation and to 1.10 (ApplicationContext). The code is no longer copy pasted into the page, but rather referenced from a real project that can be built and tested. Obviously the tutorial porting is an ongoing effort that you are invited to join.
Finally the -Wundef and -Wmissing-declarations warnings were enabled and fixed the code. These warnings help us ensuring that internal functions are correctly marked static and that our preprocessor branching is sane.
Of course there were many more changes. For the details – as usually – refer to the github tag.
Many addons ported
If you take a look at the OGRECave group on github, you will find many of the addons, that make up the Ogre ecosystem. The ones inside the group, were ported to 1.10. Due to the internal reorganization in 1.10, this allowed dropping lots (like lots) of code: e.g. FindOGRE.cmake and BaseApplication could be safely dropped.
But particularly, the documentation was regenerated and now even correctly references any external Ogre classes. Take a look:
You might notice that some information is outdated or find some typos. Take the chance and and create a pull-request on github. Most of this is just some markdown inside the according repository.
Ogre visualisation module in OpenCV
There have been Augmented Reality demos using OGRE and OpenCV for a long time. However the new Ogre Visualisation module, short ovis, provides a far better and easier integration. This allows you to write an AR demo in just 35 lines of code.
Webserver migrated
Regular visitors might have noticed some downtime of the Forums and the Wiki. This was due to the migration of our Webserver to Bytemark that are kindly providing us with free hosting. This was quite a leap forward as the old server was still running Ubuntu 12.04 with PHP software versioned at around that time. To me it is a miracle that the server still was under our control..
Anyway…the new server is now running Ubuntu 16.04 with automatic security updates. Furthermore we moved from phpbb 3.0.8 to phpbb 3.2.1 (~6 years advance) and tiki from 6.4 to tiki 15.5 (~5 years advance). Besides better security, this brings us responsive (mobile) pages and emoji support 🙂
Wiki deprecation and addonforums archival
The migration has shown some problems with our infrastructure though. We had an isolated addonforums phpbb instance where users had to register separately from the main forums. However only a few addons even had post from this year – let alone having responses. Therefore this instance was not migrated. Instead it was converted into a static archive.
Furthermore using a wiki for code is outdated by todays measures. It sits somewhere between Github, WordPress and Doxygen, where each of the alternatives offer a superior experience for the respective use-case. Therefore for contributing text, you should consider the following alternatives:
- for tutorial and sample code use Doxygen, which offers automatic code referencing
- for external projects use github, which offers code versioning and issue tracking
- the rest, which is general information, should probably be on the main page for better discoverability
IRC channel replaced by Gitter
In case you want to chat about Ogre related topics, you can now use our Gitter channel which replaces the #ogre3d IRC channel. The reason we drop IRC is that nobody of the current Ogre Team has admin access to the channel, preventing us to set-up an archival of the chat-logs or even change the headline. Of course we could have mailed back and forth with freenode, and then request botbot.me logging – but then Gitter took just a few clicks to set-up and offers superior code referencing..
by Pavel Rojtberg | Sep 2, 2017 | News
With the 1.10.8 release, the 1.10 support cycle is approximately half way over, which is a good time to recap the features and switches that got introduced since the initial release.
Note that Ogre 1.10 is the only actively maintained release – all other branches have reached their end of life, so no bugfixes will be back-ported.
If you are still using Ogre 1.9 or even a previous release, you are encouraged to upgrade to 1.10.
But besides bugfixes, there were also some notable changes, which will be presented below.
Java component
Following the Python Component that got introduced with the initial 1.10 release, we now introduce the Java Component. Both of them share the same SWIG definitions, meaning they have the same API coverage.
OpenGL improvements
The existing Vertex Array Object (VAO) implementation in GL3+ and GLES2 was so broken that VAOs had to be updated each frame – essentially disabling them. From 1.10.7 on VAOs work as expected and give a performance boost of about 10%.
Thanks to a contribution by Jean-Baptiste Griffo the GL3+ RenderSystem got a StateCache (accompanying GLES2 and GL). We took it as a starting point to further improve and unify the State Cache implementations and indeed could eliminate various bugs inside the GLES2 and GL caches.
Deprecation of node-less positioning
Traditionally Ogre allowed you to place Cameras and Lights in the scene without attaching them to a SceneNode. This resulted in three different positioning APIs for Cameras, Lights and SceneNodes with slight inconsistencies (Camera::move vs. SceneNode::translate) and one big one:
- SceneNodes & Cameras look into (0,0,-1) by default
- whereas Lights look into (0,0,1)
To make things consistent, using the Camera and Light API for positioning is deprecated now. If you want to move away from the origin, you have to attach to a SceneNode (same as you would have to with Ogre 2.x).
The only exception is Light::setDirection, which you should call with (0,0,-1) to make Lights behave like the other Nodes.
We cannot go ahead and change the default direction for 1.10 as it would break existing applications.
Compile time switches
Lets turn to some more fundamental changes that change the API and thus are hidden behind CMake switches.
OGRE_THREAD_SUPPORT == 3
To quote Steve, who initially implemented threading in Ogre:
OGRE_THREAD_SUPPORT==1 where resource management is fully threaded, was hopelessly naive. It required too many locks, and also that the rendersystem was multi-threaded. OGRE_THREAD_SUPPORT==2 improved that by not requiring that the rendersystem was threaded, and just doing disk I/O in the background, but still, the whole process is still driven within the Resource class, which means the locks are still in place on Resource and by association SharedPtr and a bunch of other classes too.
Therefore we introduce the new
OGRE_THREAD_SUPPORT==3 option. Setting this, Ogre core objects – most notably Resource – are not thread-safe. However the DefaultWorkQueue
is threaded. This allows the Terrain and MeshLOD Components to be multi-threaded without the locking overhead in OgreMain.
See #454 for details.
OGRE_USE_STD11
Setting this option, the custom SharedPtr and AtomicScalar types become merely aliases for std::shared_ptr and std::atomic which are both more portable and higher performance alternatives.
Also std::thread is used as the default threading provider.
OGRE_NODE_STORAGE_LEGACY
Traditionally Ogre uses (hash-)maps to store everything by name, including sub-nodes and attached MovableObjects. While this gives you O(log(N)) lookup, iteration performance is terrible as maps are spread all over the memory and thus trash the CPU caches.
However with rendering the most common operation is iterating (for e.g culling) over all children while lookup is only done for changing the state. Furthermore high-frequency lookups can be easily avoided by just storing the returned pointer.
Setting
OGRE_NODE_STORAGE_LEGACY=0 will use the cache friendly
std::vector instead of maps. Naturally lookup by name becomes
O(N) instead of
O(log(N)) and the API changes. However this improves rendering performance by about 20% – bringing Ogre 1.x into 2.0 range when only a few nodes need updates.
See #440 for details.
An outlook on Ogre 1.11
As the amount of possible configurations explodes with each switch we introduce, we are going to only allow one setting with Ogre 1.11 to keep things maintainable.
So rather think about the switches in terms of feature previews and not so much as options.
With Ogre 1.11 we will choose the following configuration:
- Only
OGRE_USE_STD11=ON will be supported. In other words Ogre will switch to C++11.
- Only
OGRE_NODE_STORAGE_LEGACY=OFF will be supported.
OGRE_THREAD_SUPPORT=3 will be the default. Only the std::thread provider will be supported.- OGRE_RESOURCEMANAGER_STRICT=ON will be the default.
- Default Lights direction will be (0,0,-1).
- Lots of the deprecated API will be dropped – better start looking at the deprecation warnings now.
- Custom memory allocators will no longer be supported. You will be able to define C++11 template aliases to set them for STL containers though.
