Ogre 2.2.2 Cerberus Released!

by | Jun 11, 2020 | News

This is a maintenance release. Efforts to port from 2.2.1 to 2.2.2 should be minimum.

Notable additions are:

  • Stable PSSM shadows technique added. Use this feature with ‘num_stable_splits 1’ in compositor scripts when defining the shadow node. Stable PSSM shadows tend to improve quality on the first splits, but they can dramatically reduce quality on the last splits of PSSM; thus using num_stable_splits 1 or 2 but not higher than that is recommended
  • D3D11 improved its handling of device lost
  • It is now possible to draw to a cubemap using MSAA, which was an oversight in Ogre 2.2.1. See the updated DynamicCubemap tutorial

For a full list see the Github release

Discussion in forum thread.

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.

Relevant posts:

Ogre 2.1 Baldur Released!

by | Apr 26, 2020 | News

Thank you to everyone who has been along all these many years! This release wouldn’t have been possible without you!

Thank you to every contributor (code, documentation, forum posts, art assets), to every user, to every tester that made Ogre 2.1 as stable as it is now.

This is my first experience building a binary SDK distribution. I’m used to linking to binaries built from source. If you see issues with it, ping me in the forums.

Download Ogre 2.1

Codename Baldur

First major release

For more information, see the manual
See SW & HW Requirements
See platforms supported
See Ogre 2.1 FAQ

  • Hlms (High Level Material System) to generate shaders automatically. Replaces RTSS and manual shaders
  • PBS – Physically Based Shading
  • New Compositor. More flexible, faster and powerful
  • Refactored Ogre 1.x to increase performance by several factors; using cache friendly techniques (Data Oriented Design), SIMD instructions, AZDO (Aproaching Zero Driver Overhead), auto instancing, and multithreading
  • Windows Vista/7/8/10 support, macOS via Metal and OpenGL, iOS via Metal, Linux via OpenGL
  • Many new features: Area lights, Parallax Corrected Cubemaps, Forward Clustered lights, HDR, Exponential Shadowmaps and more

Relevant posts: