We are very happy to announce that Jim Buck (‘jbuck’ on the forums) has officially joined the Ogre Team. He will mainly take care to establish Ogre in the console area in his new position as Ogre Console Lead.
Jim has been programming in the video games industry since 1996, starting as an employee at Sony and shipping well-known PlayStation franchises such as Twisted Metal and GameDay. His own company, Twitchy Thumbs Entertainment, does contract development, especially in the areas of graphics and porting on most platforms, particularly on consoles, handheld devices, and anyplace where OpenGL has a home. It’s these areas where he feels he can make a contribution as part of the OGRE team.
Google has just released the list with this year’s GoogleSummerOfCode accepted student projects. So it is time for us to welcome the following students on board at Ogre this year:
Andrei Radu (andrei_radu) – mentored by Noam Gat (Noman) – will implementing several modern illumination techniques, that are either related to, or benefit from deferred shading. Most of these have been used in several shipped games, while a couple are still considered ‘bleeding edge’.
John Soklaski (mysterycoder) – mentored by Mattan Furst (Mattan Furst) – will work on Dual Quaternion Skinning which addresses problems commonly associated with the linear blend skinning of animations such as skin collapsing. This technique utilizes dual numbers to extend quaternions to represent both rotation and translation. This allows for an efficient representation of the transformations and for application of low-cost linear blending.
Riley Adams (Praetorian) – mentored by Assaf Raman (Assaf Raman) – will build a visual unit testing framework. Traditional unit testing doesn’t help much in a context like OGRE, given the sheer size and heavy dependence on graphics API’s. The best way of doing tests without needing significant modifications or mock rendersystems, appears to be a visual solution, wherein test screenshots are compared between builds.
Martin Holas (kuxv) – mentored by Steve Streeting (sinbad) – will implement Terrain paging improvements to the Ogre::Terrain component. The project will bring new paging strategy which will try to be more accurate using actual terrain shape visibility from camera.
A big thank you to everyone who applied for a slot this year, but unfortunately had to be turned down. We only have a limited number of spots assigned by Google as well as only a limited number of possible mentors that can pull off the task. Nontheless, we are very grateful for all the great ideas you chipped in and the good discussions that took place. And of course: You are still very, very welcome to tackle your idea, even if not as a GSoC project. Anything from simple patches to huge code base additions are most certainly welcome all the time! If you have any question, feel free to contact us…and apply again next year.
Another big thank you goes out to our mentors who have offered (again) to share their time and expertise to support the projects as good as they can to make it another successful GSoC year for Ogre!
So thanks to all that are involved and best of luck to all participating students!
Here are the summarized most notable events of the last two weeks:
Open Beta of the Ogre powered game Dynastica announced, including a new trailer
iPhone/iPad app called Mini Countryman published in the Apple App Store
Oogst announced that Proun is almost finished and published some proof screenshots
a nice little 3D version of Check called Checkers was released
new release of Gorilla, the a 2D and 3D Overlay replacement system by betajaen, with new shader based materials to increase compatibility with iOS and other graphics API
Vertigo, a new fast paced arcade game has been released to the public
Regarding Google Summer of Code 2011: Ogre has been accepted as a participating organization and the submission period has ended. We are now internally reviewing the applications and will we decide which proposed student projects we can mentor and support. Expect to hear more on this soon.
Here are the most notable news from the last two weeks:
Three new versions of Ogre Meshy have been released, so we are now at v1.1
Space Hulk inspired game named Arachnophobia released
First preview of Waveit Webplayer, a web player able to run the Ogre demos inside
First screenshots of Snoogre – an Ogre Snooker game were shown
And one very good news item, fresh of the presses: We just heard that Ogre has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2011! The discussions on the possible projects have already started here. If you have any ideas or comments, feel free to join us there.
We are also preparing the application for this years Google Summer of Code and actively discussing some good ideas for student projects. More information can be found in the respective forum section. Please join us in there if you have any ideas or comments on the proposals!
