Ogre-powered game TrackVerse available for pre-order with big discount

We were just informed that the pre-order period for the new, upcoming, Ogre-powered game TrackVerse has begun with a 50% discount.

Here an extract from their official press release:

Pre-order link: http://nakama-studios.com/product/g-tv1

TrackVerse (short for Track Universe) is a game about building your own dream tracks and racing on them with friends. Build tracks from different building block themes and each theme will have its own set of matching vehicles/crafts to choose and customize from.

Customize your own racing gameplay rules to make your own race experience unique! Currently in alpha stage version 0.1, TrackVerse is still a work in progress with many more updates and theme packs coming along the way and does not in any way represent the final quality or polish. What you see is what you get. Feel free to provide feedback on helping us improve the game.

As we at Nakama Studios intend to continue releasing more refined builds of the game, we also plan on reducing the discount gradually until we reach the final version and full price of the product. So the earlier you buy, the better value you get!

Thank you for your understanding and support!

Key Features:

Build your track from a variety of theme packs (City theme pack, Post Apocalyptic theme pack, sci-fi theme pack, etc….) each with their own set of vehicles/crafts!
Mix and match different theme packs to create whackier tracks! Your imagination is the limit!
Share and race your track with friends that you’ve built!
Mod your own gameplay race rules (free-for-all, team based racing, etc…) with our gameplay script editor.
Customize your own vehicle external appearances.

What you will get in buying a pre-sales copy:
An early bird discount at 50%! off the final version price.
Private access to close beta release with exclusive updates and new theme packs that will not be available in the alpha version.
Life membership access to the game’s internet discovery portal (beta).

PRE-ORDER NOW AT 50% DISCOUNT!

Roadmap draft for Ogre 1.9 and 2.0 published

As promised in one of the last blog posts, we were going to publish a draft of our roadmap for Ogre 1.9 and 2.0, once we aligned internally. This moment has now come and we would really like your feedback on whether you agree with the listed items and also comment on their priority from your point of view.

Once this high level planning is completed, we will also need to think about ways to enhance our development processes and how to implement the planned changes in the most smooth way possible. This discussion also has been started partially, but for now we need to set the big goals and then afterwards we can break them down.

So here is the forum thread with planned changes for Ogre 1.9 and 2.0: Roadmap draft for Ogre 1.9 and 2.0

We are really looking forward to your feedback, so we hope to also see you in the discussion!
Your Ogre3D Team

OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook

We as the OgreTeam are very happy to see yet another Ogre book being published by the open-source friendly online publisher PacktPub:

OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook

In contrast to the previously released OGRE 3D 1.7 Beginner’s Guide which aimed at teaching the basics of Ogre from scratch, this new book takes a different approach:

“This is a cookbook with over 50 recipes offering solutions to common application development problems while creating graphics using OGRE 3D, with explained sample code and screenshots added in. Each recipe teaches you about a particular feature of OGRE 3D.”
Quote by PacktPub

The book covers a multitude of different topics, such as:

  • Creation of minimal Ogre3D applications
  • Creation of Ogre plugins
  • Creation of custom Ogre Resource Managers
  • Various input methods such as mouse, keyboard and speech
  • Object and Scene management (e.g. scene loading from (Land)XML)
  • Light and Material handling
  • Various kinds of animations
  • Multimedia Integration (Video, Sound, Speech)
  • Much more, compare table of contents

More details about the book and their authors can be found directly at PacktPub: OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook

There is also a special deal to get both OGRE 3D books from PacktPub as a bundle with a nice discount. So if your are looking to start with Ogre3D, this might be a way to go. But even if you already have experience with our engine, the cookbook can be a good addition to extend your repertoire of techniques.

BTW: The fact that we just released Ogre 1.8, should not stop you from considering either of the two PacktPub books. With the exception of one or two recipes covering Terrain related topics, everything else will still be valid and applicable to Ogre 1.8 as well!

Ogre 1.8 has been released

We are glad to announce that we finally were able to release Ogre 1.8 (Byatis) which as of now is the new official, stable Ogre version.

New SDK versions have already been uploaded and all download links are adjusted, so feel free to give it a whirl.

We also want to apologize for the rather substantial delay given that the original estimated release date was beginning of January. Basically seconds before we wanted to release we found some bugs in the samples and felt that this is something that needs to be fixed when releasing a new major version. While tackling those issues, we found a series of related issues and again started fixing them as well. In the end that consumed quite a bit of time, but the bright side is: Almost all samples will now run on all platforms and compilers and Ogre 1.8 has become even better and more stable thanks to all the fixes. So we’d like to mark that as a success.

Nonetheless we of course strive to make the next release cycles much smoother, but considering that this was the first release without sinbad as the leader, we are rather happy with the outcome! And for this we mainly have to thank Kojack, masterfalcon and CABAlistic who did most of the work. Well done!

So what is the plan for the future now?
As you might have seen, there were already some public discussions about the next things to tackle, when we discussed possible GSoC 2012 projects. We internally already started to outline where we want to move in regards to Ogre 1.9 and Ogre 2.0. We still need some days to reach a strong consensus, but once we are at that point, we will inform everybody and put our ideas out there for discussion. Once the community is happy with the plans, we will need to figure out how to best approach the realization of those big challenges in front of us. But with such a great community as the one Ogre is proud to have, we are sure we will be able to get the job done. This time perhaps even in time…

So, as usual: Feel free to chime into the discussions in the forum and share your opinions and ideas. And thanks again to everyone involved in helping Ogre 1.8 become reality!

PS: Unfortunately, we do not have a complete change log this time, but two partial ones, which should give you a rather good overview: Basic changelog in our wiki and changelog in our BitBucket repository.

NeoAxis Game Engine: Release v.1.2

The guys over at NeoAxis Group Ltd. have released yet another update to their Ogre-based game engine “NeoAxis Game Engine”.

The main new features are:

  • New post-effects, such as Depth of field, Volumetric Light Scattering (God Rays) and a Vignette effect
  • Intel HD Graphics support
  • Direct import of new 3D formats
  • Extended localization support
  • Toolset improvements

More detailed information and links to the complete change log and customer references, can be found on their detailed release page.