First off: We as the Ogre3D team wish the the whole Ogre3D community a Happy New Year!
Looking back at 2013, we see a successful year for our beloved rendering engine, with two highlights being yet another great Google Summer of Code and the release of Ogre 1.9. And the new year 2014 is also having a great start, since we can happily announce that we have a new superb addition to our development team:
So here it is: Matias Goldberg joins the team!
Everyone following the development of Ogre3D will by now be familiar with Matias, since he is the driving force behind the whole Ogre 2.0 revamp. It all started off with his in-depth analysis of Ogre’s performance bottlenecks in November 2012, followed by his Ogre 2.0 GSoC project to start fixing those in the Summer of 2013. But as promised he did not stop there, but continues to work hard on the v2-0 branch. You can follow his work either directly via his commits to the repositories, his blog posts related to Ogre, the Ogre 2.0 wiki page or various forum threads covering a variety of topics in the Ogre 2.0+ forum section. We of course encourage everyone to get involved and provide feedback.
BTW: Merging in the first three GSoC projects that we selected for the next Ogre version 1.10, will take a bit longer than anticipated, so we cannot yet release the first release candidate as originally planned for right around now, but instead we will push that RC1 back a few weeks. The overall branch quality will also benefit from that since it gives us more time to have a look at some open JIRA tickets and helps to get the code base into a mature enough state.
As usual: All community support is welcome! So if you can, please jump on board, to ensure that 2014 becomes yet another successful year for all of us!
Your Ogre3D Team