Good news! We have officially added the v2-0-0RC1 tag to the Ogre repository (commit) indicating that we reached our first Release Candidate milestone for Ogre 2.0!
Our original plan was to tag this release as “CTP” (Community Technology Preview) and the upcoming AZDO (Approaching Zero Driver Overhead) improvements as “final”. However this proved to be very confusing for the community and in fact presented two practical concerns:
- v2-0-0RC1 is actually very stable and relatively easy to port to when coming from Ogre 1.9 or Ogre 1.10 (= current unstable default branch). The external API interface is quite similar, with performance benefits from efficient frustum culling and scene graph management (plus it’s multi-threaded). Several users in the community had already started porting to it.
- The AZDO branch was going to be labelled as “final”. Even though being quite impressive feature- and performance-wise, it is not complete, cannot be considered stable, and is far from actually being final. Furthermore, porting from Ogre 1.9 or even from Ogre 2.0-RC1 to the AZDO branch is not a trivial task as the external API changes are considerable.
Therefore we concluded that:
- The “CTP” branch will be released as Ogre 2.0 and is a good stepping stone for projects that require better performance without the high risk associated with porting when there are big engine changes.
- The “AZDO” branch will be released as Ogre 2.1 at some point in the future. External interface changes are quite significant and porting to this version requires more work and inherently results in more risk.
Our main focus of development will be on Ogre 2.1. We will only be providing basic bug fixes for Ogre 2.0 to be able to dedicate more resources to Ogre 2.1.
Note: While more and more focus will shift to Ogre 2.x, we will not immediately abandon Ogre 1.x. In fact, there is still at least one release in the making (Ogre 1.10). Once we have a more concrete timeline for it, we will announce the details.
Notes on Ogre 2.0 RC1
- D3D9 RenderSystem is the recommended API.
- D3D11 RenderSystem has fallen behind the Ogre 1.10 branch and is quite outdated and buggy in comparison. We will try to merge the changes back, but there is no ETA yet. Until then, the use of D3D11 in this branch is discouraged.
- We will eventually merge the emscripten, WebGL support and the STB codec additions from default, but there is no ETA either.
- GL3+RenderSystem is NOT recommended.
- Legacy OpenGL RenderSystem works.
- RTSS works.
- Cg, PluginFX, MeshLodGenerator and Overlays work.
- Most of the samples from the SampleBrowser work.
Other components and/or plugins not mentioned here may not work may or haven’t been properly tested.
Notes on Ogre 2.1 (unstable)
We want to make a few first clarifications about the Ogre 2.1 branch to prevent confusions in the community. We will go into much more detail in the next few days in a dedicated news post. But for now:
- GL3+ will be the recommended RenderSystem.
- D3D11 is not yet supported but planned. Checkout the ideas page from the GSoC-2015.
- GLES2 was working until recently but its support broke not long ago. We’re committed on restoring it again.
- Legacy OpenGL and D3D9 support will be dropped.