With the year 2010 soon coming to an end, it is time for us as the Ogre Community to look back on this eventful past year. It is time to think about all the amazing moments and the enormous progress we made, but it is also time to bring back some of the sad moments. Unfortunately, they are inseparably chained together in that funny thing called life we all struggle through.
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.
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.
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.
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