{mosimage}Well, here we are again - the season
traditionally associated with eating, drinking and being merry, the
time for fat men in red costumes, family gatherings, roaring fires
and, dare I say it, and bit of fun and relaxation. It seems the perfect
time to sit back with a glass of mulled wine, and look over
what 2006 has meant for OGRE and its community, and what parcels of
delight 2007 might hold for us. I seem to say this every year, but 2006
has been the busiest year so far. No really, it has 🙂 There's
certainly an awful lot to talk about, celebrate and look forward to,
and given that I'm relying largely on memory here, I'll apologise in
advance to anyone I forget to mention – but I'll do my best. So, if
you're sitting comfortably, I shall begin….
The Year of Dagon
Yes, March/April 2006 saw the transition from Ogre 1.0.x, codenamed
Azathoth, to Dagon or Ogre 1.2.x. We've separated our frequent
bugfixing (interface-stable) releases from our less frequent, major
feature-adding releases for many years and so Dagon brought with
it a large number of significant enhancements, including the compositor
system, support for multiple simultaneous render targets (MRTs), new
animation features and material enhancements. Dagon had been in
development since 2005 but 2006 was the year it became our official
stable release, and I don't think anyone has looked back.
Of course, whilst Dagon is now what most people are using for their
deployed applications, and we have continually supported and refined it
over the year with maintenance releases, our new development work
moved immediately on to the next phase, which is Eihort or Ogre
1.4.x. Lots of work has gone into this over the last 8 months,
including SSE/SIMD enhancements, OIS integration, new even more
advanced lighting / shadowing options, more flexible licensing options,
and lots more. We're nearing a release candidate now, and so we expect
2007 to be the Year of Eihort, from a stable release point of view.
Plans are already afoot for the next development version after that
since the Eihort feature list is frozen now – development on Ogre 1.6.x
or 'Shoggoth' will begin shortly after Eihort emerges from release
candidate stage early in the new year.
Project Fever
We always like to celebrate the success
of projects using Ogre, and we're very pleased that a large number of
projects have been completed and released in 2006. It's one thing to
make a prototype or a demo, it's quite another thing to make a product
robust enough to be let loose on the general public, and we're very
glad that Ogre helped so many projects reach that ultimate
milestone in 2006 – here are some of them:
And that was only the
finished projects! There were a large number of exciting projects
announced in 2006, here are just some of the ones I picked out:
Apologies
in advance to everyone I missed – when I came to scanning back
through the year I was really struck with just how many projects there
have been in 2006, and it took me a while just to pick these ones out.
Congratulations to everyone involved in our community for making 2006
easily the most interesting year so far. To keep up with current
events, just keep an eye on our Featured Projects page and Showcase Forum for your continuous supply of Ogre-powered eye candy.
Ogre in Print!
A really important watershed in 2006 was the publication of the first book
dedicated to Ogre, Pro OGRE 3D Programming by Gregory Junker, published by Apress.
There's nothing quite like a physical, hardback book sitting on
your shelf to really make you realise how far your former hobby
project has come.
Greg did a great job on this one, and it makes for a
really solid introduction to Ogre for newcomers. It sounds like
it's selling quite well too, which is definitely good news. Thanks to Greg and all the people at Apress who supported this project, it was wonderful to see this come to fruition. With any luck this won't be the last book you see on this subject.
Google Summer of Code
First run in 2005, the Google Summer of Code is probably the most
ambitious open-source internship programme ever conceived, where Google
sponsors students to work on open source projects over the summer.
Around a hundred projects took part in 2006, and we were lucky enough
to be one of them. We took on 6 students who tackled a variety of projects
including crowd rendering, enhanced shadow techniques and tools.
All of the projects were successful, some very useful code was
generated (some of which you will find in Eihort), and most
importantly, it was a very interesting learning experience for all
concerned. If we have the opportunity again we'll definitely
participate.
Siggraph 2006
I attended Siggraph for the first time this year, and held a Birds of a Feather meeting for those interested in Ogre. I was pleased that quite a few people turned up, and I gave a short talk on where Ogre was, where it was going and answered a few questions from the floor. It was very nice to get to meet some of our community members in person, and I hope you liked the Ogre business cards 🙂 I think the idea of having a community get-together on the back of a larger conference is a good idea and will consider doing this again in the future.
Team changes
The OGRE team has altered several times over
the years, and 2006 was no exception. Whilst myself and genva are still on the core team, Wladimir ':wumpus:' Van der
Laan mostly retired from active service after Dagon's release due to
workload, and Jeff 'nfz' Doyle had to step down
officially part way through the year, although unofficially he's still
very much an active
contributor as and when he has time. In their place, Phil 'pjcast'
Castaneda stepped in and has taken over support of the Linux platform,
as well as being responsible for the switch to OIS for demo input in
Eihort and the cleanup of various platform issues. Justin Walsh also
volunteered to coordinate the Mac OSX platform, and together with
long-time OSX contributors like Will Thimbleby has improved the update
frequency for this platform in the absence of core developers on the
platform.
On a personal note, 2006 was a significant change for
me since in November I took the plunge and gave up my day job to
concentrate on Ogre-related activities, working for my own company Torus Knot Software Ltd.
Giving up a regular salary has been a fairly daunting prospect,
but Ogre is at the stage now where to grow and mature further it really
needs more attention than I could give it as a spare-time operative
without extensive burnout, and there are quite a few opportunities out
there to promote and support its use in commercial environments, which
need more time to nurture. Whilst most in the community won't notice
any difference (except perhaps my nerves being less fried in the forums
;)), it should hopefully help to grow Ogre's presence in the wider
world and further solidify the project for everyone's benefit.
Wrap-up
It's
always really hard to summarise all the things that go on over the
course of a year with a project as active as Ogre, but I hope that's
given you a taste of where we've been this year. There are some things
I didn't cover (such as the new Add-on projects that have sprung up this year), so apologies for any omissions, but even virtual publishing space is finite :)
As
2007 looms, we have so much on the boil it's hard to keep track
- Eihort (Ogre 1.4) is due for release very soon now, and Shoggoth
(Ogre 1.6) is already in the early planning stages, and there are more
community projects (be they add-ons, higher-level engines, tools,
applications) active than you could shake several large bundles of
sticks at. It's probably fair to say that Ogre's profile has increased
still further since this time last year, the community is as vibrant
(read: hectic) as ever, and we're certainly never bored. Whatever
happens, in 2007 we intend to continue to bring you ever more
functional, reliable and just plain neato graphics rendering software
to the best of our ability. See you next year!
Steve 'sinbad' Streeting
OGRE Project Lead
27 Dec 2006