following the last post about what is going on around Ogre, here is another update. With the Ogre 13.1 release, mainly the usability of Ogre was improved with the following additions.
Table of Contents
Ogre 13.1 release
The per-pixel RTSS stage gained support for two sided lighting. This is useful if you want to have a plane correctly lit from both sides or for transparency effects, as shown below:
Furthermore, PCF16 filtering support was added to the PSSM RTSS stage. This gives you softer shadows at the cost of 4x the texture lookups. The images below show crops from the ShaderSystem sample at 200% highlighting the effect
blender2ogre improved even further
Thanks to the continued work by Guillermo “sercero” Ojea Quintana, blender2ogre gained some exciting new features.
The first is support for specifying Static and Instanced geometry like this. You might wonder whether you should be using that and if yes, which variant. Therefore, he also collected the respective documentation which is available here.
The second notable feature is support for .mesh import, which might come handy if you are modding some Ogre based game or just lost the source .blend file. This feature is based on the respective code found in the Kenshi Blender Plugin (which in turn is based on the Torchlight plugin).
Then, old_man_auz chimed in and fixed some bugs when exporting to Ogre-Next, while also cleaning up the codebase and improving documentation.
Finally, yours truly added CI unit-tests, which make contributing to blender2ogre easier.
OpenAL EFX support in ogre-audiovideo
Again, contributed by sercero are some important additions to the audio part of the ogre-audiovideo project which drastically improve the useability.
The first one is that you no longer need boost to enable threading. OgreOggSound will now follow whatever Ogre is configured with.
The second one is being able to use EFX effects with openal-soft instead of the long-dead creative implementation. This enables effects like reverb or bandpass filters.
Read more in the release-notes. This release was too, done by sercero which kindly took the burden of co-maintaining the project.