Ogre 13.4.0 was just released. This release contains some significant bug-fixes and feature additions, which we will discuss in more detail below. We recommend all users of the 13.x branch to update.

Table of Contents

For a full overview of the changes, see the changelog.

Extended PBR-material support

with blender 2.8+ and blender2ogre 0.8.3, you can now choose to export PBR metal-roughness parameters instead of converting them to a FFP approximation as before.

While at it, several bugs in the RTSS PBR implementation were fixed. Now transparency, ambient lighting and PSSM shadows play nicely with PBR.

Bullet Integration now available as a Component

In the User Survey btogre was the most popular external Ogre component with over 53% votes.

To make life for those who use it easier, it is now integrated into the main repo as a component. This allows you to just build it as part of Ogre on one hand and on the other hand this ensures that it is integration tested by our CI.

VET_INT_10_10_10_2_NORM support added

Ogre now supports normalized INT_10_10_10_2 as the vertex format. This packs 3 signed values with 10bit precision and a fourth 2bit value into 4 bytes – the size required by a single float.

If you are using normal-maps, you will notice how this format is perfect to store a tangent with parity, while only requiring 25% of storage compared to 4 floats.

Additionally, you can use it to store normals where storage requirements drop to 33% too.
In both cases the 10bit resolution is typically sufficient.

The format is natively supported by GLES3, GL3+, Vulkan and Metal meaning that you also save bandwidth and VRAM.

With the other RenderSystems, Ogre will transparently unpack the data to float at mesh load time, so you at least can benefit from smaller mesh files.
E.g. a 76 MB mesh can be reduced to 50 MB, when using packed normals and tangents.

To update your meshes, OgreMeshUpgrader gained the option -pack, to be used like:

OgreMeshUpgrader -pack your.mesh

Other Additions

In other news Bites Input now not only handles Gamepads but generic Joysticks and Ogre can be used online through Google Colab.