Ogre 2.2.1 Cerberus Released!

by | Apr 30, 2020 | News

Whoa! What’s this? Didn’t you announce Ogre 2.1 Baldur was released a few days ago? Yes! Then, what’s going on?

I noticed Ogre 2.1’s release announcement atracted more popularity than I expected (thank you!!!) thus I shall explain:

Ogre 2.1 has been in development for many years, approximately since 2015.

At some point it matured and we started working on the next version: Ogre 2.2

Our regular users who stick around knew 2.1 has been stable for a while now; but we just didn’t have the time or resources to make a release (packaging binaries, ensuring everything works, etc). And many fixes from 2.2 also kept getting backported.

And 2.2 had just reached maturity too.

Ogre 2.1 was a major refactor and users porting existing code from Ogre 1.x is definitely doable, but still requires a lot of effort.

Unlike 1.x -> 2.1 transition though, 2.1 -> 2.2 transition is a much smoother experience, because it mostly touches Texture manipulation code and end users rarely manipulate a lot of Textures via code directly.

The Texture code of 2.1 was entirely replaced by the new TextureGpu code; which supports background streaming and solves many RAM issues that plagued 2.2.

Wait! 2.2.1… where’s Ogre 2.2.0?

Ogre 2.2.1 and 2.2.0 are being released concurrently. This is because during development a few of our users and testers needed to distinguish between more stable features (texture streaming) from the less stable ones (Global Illumination) and we used OGRE_VERSION_PATCH for that.

However our GI code has stabilized now.

Because there is now virtually no reason to use Ogre 2.2.0 over 2.2.1; we just went ahead and make a source-code-only release of Ogre 2.2.0 for archival reasons and a source-code + SDK release of 2.2.1

Ogre 2.2.1 also contained several bug fixes which made no sense to backport to 2.2.0 as it would only increase our work.

Download Ogre 2.2.1

Codename Cerberus

For more information, see the manual

See SW & HW Requirements
See platforms supported
See Ogre 2.1 FAQ
See What’s new in Ogre 2.2

  • Texture streaming! Completely refactored Texture code. It consumes a lot less RAM and supports background streaming
  • Voxel Cone Tracing (VCT): Semi-Realtime GI solution. Supports diffuse and specular. Can consume a lot of VRAM depending on quality. Lighting changes can be done in realtime. Changes to static objects in scene needs to rebuild voxels (not realtime)
  • Irradiance Field with Depth (IFD): Generic variant of DDGI using Voxels (consumes more VRAM) or Rasterization (slower to build). It supports diffuse only and is lower quality than VCT, but is much faster. And if completely static, consumes very little memory.
  • Per-pixel Cubemap probes
  • VR readiness: New sample showing how to integrate OpenVR SDK, deal with running start, performance optimizations such as Instanced Stereo, Hidden Area Mesh and Radial Density Mask
  • Mobile friendly: Added Load and Store actions to control how TBDR GPUs flush their caches

What’s next?

  • Stable PSSM Shadowmaps
  • Vulkan support

All branches except the Vulkan one are being merged back into master. Whatever is in master will likely become Ogre 2.2.2 one day.

That doesn’t mean Vulkan will or will not make it to 2.2.2, it’s just that we want to always keep master branch with a relatively high degree of stability (i.e. rolling release model), which the Vulkan branch cannot yet provide.

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