Well, 2002 has been and gone, and it’s only really now that I have the time to reflect on it that I realise just how significant the last year has been for OGRE.
A year ago OGRE was just a little pet project of mine, running on Windows only and with a fairly low profile in comparison to a lot of engines out there. At that time the latest and greatest feature was the loading of Quake3 levels, although I was still working on aspects of it. I tinkered, had fun, ranted a bit sometimes and answered the odd email, but overall it was a pretty quiet life.
12 months later there are 4 permanent members of the team and numerous ad-hoc contributors, OGRE runs on at least 3 platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OSX), and our feature list has expanded greatly. The community has exploded in the last few months too. Often over 200 messages a week get posted on the forums, we get thousands of hits a day on the main site, and projects using OGRE are springing up all over the place. I spend as much time replying to email, reading and posting forum messsages, and answering questions on IRC as I do coding these days. It’s hectic, but it’s also very rewarding to know that there are a lot of people out there who are like our work, and often pitch in to help out.
So I just want to say a big thankyou to the rest of the team and all the people who have contributed, talked about, promoted, and just generally got involved with OGRE for making 2002 such a great year. Lets hope 2003 is as exciting!