Ogre’s been going for almost 10 years now, and in all this time we’ve never had an official mascot character. Well, now we do! 
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.
Another six months have passed, and it’s time for another maintenance release to the 1.7 stable branch (codenamed ‘Cthugha’). You can find a list of all the bug fixes after the jump. As usual there are no feature changes or API breakage in this release – we save those for the unstable development branch – which of course you can grab from Mercurial if you want to join us on the bleeding edge.
