by sinbad | Aug 25, 2008 | News
2008 OGRE User Survey
One of the questions I always get asked when talking to other people in the industry is ‘How many people are using OGRE then?’. Compared to regular closed-source software where people can’t use it unless they pay, it’s hard for us to answer this question accurately, apart from pointing at download statistics (approximate 40,000 per month, if you were wondering). However, this doesn’t necessarily reflect how many people are seriously using OGRE.
So, why does it matter? Quite aside from it being nice to know, the practical reason is that the size of the user base influences how 3rd parties perceive us, and specifically how much priority is assigned to support requests we place with 3rd parties such as graphics card manufacturers and driver writers. Put simply, if we can show we have a large number of companies using OGRE for serious projects, the more resources we can get assigned to our support requests.
Since ‘gating’ downloads with forms requiring contact information is both undesirable and impractical in an open-source project, I’m instead running a survey to try to collect this information. It’s not perfect of course, since as an opt-in process it will ‘undersample’ the number of people using OGRE, but I’m hoping it will be enough. Please participate if you’re a serious OGRE user – the survey is short and sweet, and you don’t have to provide any identifying information if you don’t want to. However, if you are able, I would ask you to opt-in to provide a bit more information like your company name and projects, since having specific companies and projects to refer to can probably help our cause.
Thanks for your time!
by sinbad | Aug 24, 2008 | News
Lots has happened in the last couple of months, so here’s a quick round-up of some of the interesting things you might have missed!
Libraries, Add-ons & Tools
- Hikari – a new library that makes it really easy to use Flash content in your Ogre application, especially for creating user interfaces
- OgreSpeedTree – a new commercial library that makes rendering trees and foliage created with SpeedTree in your Ogre application quick and easy
- Myrddin Landscape Plugin – a library to help you render your terrain and the surrounding atmospheric effects
- StemCell Engine – a full game engine created with Ogre
- ArtifexTerra – a terrain editing & painting tool
New Featured Projects using Ogre
As ever, apologies for anyone I left out, the forums are your master reference for all that goes on in the world of Ogre.
[Edit] Links fixed!
by sinbad | Jun 16, 2008 | News
Yeah, I know I said 1.4.8 was our last Eihort branch release, but in the last few weeks we discovered some serious problems with NVIDIA cards when using the new 175.x driver stream, so this maintenance release addresses that. This is an important update that all users should take on – the source archives and some of the SDKs are updated, the rest of the SDKs will be updated as they become available, keep checking back if yours isn’t available yet.
Download!
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by sinbad | May 10, 2008 | News
{mosimage}We’re pleased to announce what will almost certainly be the last maintenance release on the 1.4.x branch , codenamed Eihort, available now from the download area. There are only a few bugfixes to report this time around, full details are included in this post after the ‘Read More’ break. The source releases have been updated, and most of the SDK packages – the others will be updated when the respective maintainers are able to provide them.
After this release, we will be concentrating on releasing a new stable release on the 1.6.x branch, codenamed Shoggoth, which we’re very much looking forward to. We’ve added a lot of new and improved features in the last year, and quite a few people are already using it (from Subversion), so a stable release won’t be far away now.
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by sinbad | Apr 27, 2008 | News
OGRE’s main source code repository has now been moved to Subversion.
The instructions have been updated to reflect the change, if you use the CVS version of Ogre you should move across to the Subversion repository ASAP, since there will be no more updates to the CVS repository from today.
You should also note that the Addons have moved to their own Sourceforge project, in a separate Subversion repository, instructions on how to obtain them have also been updated. If you are an addon developer, please note that I have only added back access to people who have committed to the CVS repository in the last 12 months, or have otherwise been active. Should you find that your access is restricted and you need to be added back, please let us know.
