by spacegaier | Aug 2, 2011 | News
Those of you who have been around Ogre for some time might remember that back in 2008, we conducted a survey about our user base. The results of which can be found here.
We now decided that after three years it might be a good idea to re-assess our current situation by another, more extensive survey. It is similar to the original one (since we included the old questions to be able to compare the results), but the survey also contains a bunch of new ones to take new developments such as Ogre usage on mobile devices into account.
So for the next four weeks until the 31th of August, you have the chance to participate and help us to get an impression about our user base, how Ogre is used and share some wishes for the future. Simply follow the link, answer the math question correctly (but only if you are not a bot ;)) and make your way through the 20 questions. It should not take up much time since most of the questions are simple checkbox or radio button questions.
Link to survey
We want to thank you all upfront for helping us to develop Ogre further and getting some valuable insight information about the people using the engine!
Best wishes,
Your Ogre team
PS: We would be glad if you could spread the word about the survey via all available channels to all potential Ogre users, because: The more participants, the more accurate are the results of course…
by spacegaier | Jul 14, 2011 | News
We are very happy to welcome another very talented programmer in the lines of our Ogre team: Mattan Furst. To some extend he already was considered a part of it, but now we made it official. Congratulations!
Mattan joined the team in July 2011. He has a master’s degree in computer science. After playing computer games for many years as a child, Mattan was inspired to seek his fortune in the field of computer graphic. He currently works as a senior programmer in the international SimiGon group, part of the team building the company’s 3D engine. Mattan contributes his time in Ogre as a general code maintainer.
by spacegaier | Jul 11, 2011 | Game Highlight, News
Many of you might already heard of the fantastic game Joost van Dongen released some weeks ago: Proun. We of course have too and it definitely deserve a mention here…
The whole game was created by Joost van Dongen, except for the sound effects and the music production, which were done by Arno Landsbergen on the basis of Joost’s own compositions. In “normal” life he is the lead programmer at Ronimo Games, an indie game developer known for Swords & Soldiers (PS3/Wii/PC/Mac/iPhone/iPad), De Blob (PC) and Awesomenauts (PS3/Xbox360).
A lot of insight information mainly regarding the development history and artistic aspects of his creation, were already spread via his blog, which we highly recommend if you are interested in some details. But here are some additional more technical corner points he kindly shared with us:
- created in C++ using Visual Studio 2005
- shaders coded in Cg using Context
- levels in 3dsmax using a combination of the old Maxscript 3dsmax Ogre exporter and own exporters and plugins
- textures were created in Photoshop
- lightmaps were baked using Vray
- ODE was used for collision detection
- Irrklang provided the sound foundations
- highscores are realized with the help of RakNet
The game can directly be purchased via the game’s website on a “pay-what-you-want”-basis.
by spacegaier | Jul 8, 2011 | News
It has been a while since our last news summary post…sorry for that. But on the bright side: It makes this one a lot bigger than usual, so enjoy!
- first version of Bloom editor, a 3D text editor was showcased
- animationsinstitue.de showed some impressions from their Emote Messaging System, that can be used to created individual, animated short messages to share with friends
- early screenshots from the platform game Bombs&Penguins were released
- beta pictures of the ambitous game Battle Tiers Invasion were shared
- the Ogre AntTweakBar plugin TwOgre was updated to work with Linux
- metaldev updated his GUI library buttonGUI as well has as his LFA Scene Manager
- updated version of the game GraLL2 was published
- Lightwave to Ogre exporter was updated by spacegaier to work with LW 9.6 and LW 10
- teaser video of Will of Nature, a really nice school project from the Netherlands, was released
- first ingame footage from the German MMORPG Espadon Online was published
- NeoAxis game engine reached their 1.0 milestone
- Oogst finally released his long awaited game Proun, that got a great deal of buzz on the internet – dedicated post with some additional information will follow soon
In addition, there is a lot of progress with our four Google Summer of Code projects. Check the out in this subforum.
And the breaking news is: The highly acclaimed Ogre based game Torchlight went platinum as they sold more than 1 million copies. Congratulations!
by spacegaier | Jul 2, 2011 | News
Great news from the Ogre ecosystem: One of the most advanced game engines using Ogre for rendering has finally reached their 1.0 milestone release. Below they assembled some key points and we are happy to spread the word here.
What is NeoAxis?
NeoAxis Group has finally released NeoAxis Engine 1.0. It took over six years for NeoAxis Engine to grow from a project being developed by a single enthusiast into a most innovative 3D development tool with an international team working on it. NeoAxis Engine is an all-purpose, modern 3D graphics engine for 3D simulations, visualizations and games, which uses OGRE as low-level rendering engine.
What can it do?
Any stuff a good should have:
- NeoAxis Engine includes unique software environment used for creating project’s game logic. NeoAxis Game Object System is an integrated system including Game Object Editor, Map Editor and built-in networking support which enables game object synchronization on high-level.
- NeoAxis has a powerful .NET based API. The power of NeoAxis Engine and .NET enables you to concentrate on development of the project logic and to obtain greatest speed and quality of development. Internally, the engine uses the power of unmanaged C/C++ components such as rendering, physics and audio for maximal performance.
- Full-featured set of tools covers all areas of asset development. Toolset includes World Editor, Terrain Editor, Game Object Editor, GUI Editor, Effects Editor, Physical Model Editor, Material Editor.
- Support of all major IDE’s including Microsoft Visual Studio, SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop.
- Advanced physics simulation includes support of two physical engines (NVIDIA PhysX and ODE).
- Ability to create windowed and non-game applications. The SDK includes examples of WinForms and WPF applications.
- Rendering components include most of modern advanced features such as 64-bit HDR Rendering, Parallel-Split Shadow Maps, advanced animation support, post effect framework, realistic water shading, and more. NeoAxis is also optimized for a wider range of video cards. In addition to the support of modern video cards, NeoAxis supports integrated cards and laptop video cards.
- Ready to marketplace deployment. NeoAxis powered games are already being sold on Steam, Impulse, Mac App Store, GamersGate.
Why NeoAxis?
The keystone of NeoAxis engine is its unprecedented functionality that may save you incredible amount of time and money. NeoAxis provides you with a complete toolset with which you can develop all aspects of your application without having to deal much with programming.
NeoAxis also enables you to create cross-platform applications. Your projects can be easily run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This saves you a great deal of time, removing the necessity of transferring your application to different platforms.
To even further speed up the development process NeoAxis Group has included a set of already accomplished various game types (including First-person shooter, Third-Person Shooter, Real-time Strategy, Arcade) in the SDK. This enables the developer to avoid the process of creating project’s mechanics from the scratch, instead just modifying the existing game type according to developer’s requirements. Thus, you can concentrate on game design instead of having to write megabytes of code.
And the last but not the least: developing with NeoAxis is free! You only pay for commercial use and only once.
Read more about NeoAxis on www.neoaxis.com.
