We are glad to announce that we finally were able to release Ogre 1.8 (Byatis) which as of now is the new official, stable Ogre version.
New SDK versions have already been uploaded and all download links are adjusted, so feel free to give it a whirl.
We also want to apologize for the rather substantial delay given that the original estimated release date was beginning of January. Basically seconds before we wanted to release we found some bugs in the samples and felt that this is something that needs to be fixed when releasing a new major version. While tackling those issues, we found a series of related issues and again started fixing them as well. In the end that consumed quite a bit of time, but the bright side is: Almost all samples will now run on all platforms and compilers and Ogre 1.8 has become even better and more stable thanks to all the fixes. So we’d like to mark that as a success.
Nonetheless we of course strive to make the next release cycles much smoother, but considering that this was the first release without sinbad as the leader, we are rather happy with the outcome! And for this we mainly have to thank Kojack, masterfalcon and CABAlistic who did most of the work. Well done!
So what is the plan for the future now?
As you might have seen, there were already some public discussions about the next things to tackle, when we discussed possible GSoC 2012 projects. We internally already started to outline where we want to move in regards to Ogre 1.9 and Ogre 2.0. We still need some days to reach a strong consensus, but once we are at that point, we will inform everybody and put our ideas out there for discussion. Once the community is happy with the plans, we will need to figure out how to best approach the realization of those big challenges in front of us. But with such a great community as the one Ogre is proud to have, we are sure we will be able to get the job done. This time perhaps even in time…
So, as usual: Feel free to chime into the discussions in the forum and share your opinions and ideas. And thanks again to everyone involved in helping Ogre 1.8 become reality!
PS: Unfortunately, we do not have a complete change log this time, but two partial ones, which should give you a rather good overview: Basic changelog in our wiki and changelog in our BitBucket repository.