Over the last couple months we have been working on Voxel Cone Tracing (VCT), a Global Illumination solution.
Voxel Cone Tracing could be seen as an approximated version of ray marching.
The scene is voxelized and three voxels are generated, containing albedo, normals and emissive properties. In other words, we build a Minecraft-looking representation of the world:
Unzip them and run the script that matches your platform and OS!
For example if you’re on Windows and have Visual Studio, run either:
build_ogre_Visual_Studio_15_2017_Win32.bat
build_ogre_Visual_Studio_15_2017_x64.bat
depending on the architecture you want to build for (e.g. 32-bit vs 64-bit)
The scripts will automatically start building, but you will also find the Visual Studio solution files under Ogre/build/OGRE.sln
If you’re on Linux, run either:
./build_ogre_linux_c++98.sh
./build_ogre_linux_c++11.sh
./build_ogre_linux_c++latest.sh
Which one you need depends on the C++ version you’re targetting. C++98 compiles much faster than the rest, but may have incompatibilities (particularly with std::string) if mixed in a project build for C++11 or newer
There are currently no build scripts for Apple ecosystem. For building for iOS, refer to the Setting up Guide. The instructions for Linux should work for building for macOS, but may require additional manual intervention.
We hope this makes your life easier! And let us know if you encounter problems with these scripts! The goal is that building Ogre from scratch becomes as simple as tapping a few clicks.
Hoo boy! This report was scheduled for January but couldn’t be released on time for various reasons.
We have another report coming as this is old news already! We have another report coming mostly talking about VTC (Voxel Cone Tracing) which is a very interesting feature that has been in development during this year.
But until then, let’s talk about all the other features that have been implemented so far!
It means the branch is stabilizing. Back when it was v2-2-WIP, it was very unstable. Checking out that branch meant you could find crashes, memory leaks, missing or broken features; and the API interface was changing very quickly, thus updating the repository could mean your code would no longer compile and required adapting.
Over the last couple months, the API interfaces on 2.2 had begun to settle down, bugs were fixed and there were no apparent leaks. In fact some teams started already using it.
Now that it is no longer WIP, while there could still be API breakage on the 2.2 branch or accidental crashes/regressions, it shouldn’t be anything serious or that requires intensive porting.
We still have a few missing features (such as saving textures as DDS) but they’re not used frequently.
Coming up next
We still owe you a Progress Report of what’s been going on in 2.1 and 2.2 in the past year and a half; we have that written down but still needs a few reviews.
Coming up next is:
More real time GI improvements
VR performance optimizations
We are planning on a Vulkan/D3D12 backend
Additionally we have a community member working on GPU-driven rendering and GPU particle FXs; while another community member just contributed Morph animations to 2.1
Yes, Morph animations are finally HW accelerated again! We are evaluating on porting this contribution to 2.2; it shouldn’t take long but we’re evaluating if it can be improved with the use of Compute Shaders
What about Ogre 2.1?
If someone wants to teach Matias aka dark_sylinc a quick automated way to create installer SDKs, that is welcomed! (he never liked handling that!!!)
Ogre 2.1 has been very stable. Eugene ported several improvements from the 1.x branch; and we currently are dealing with a regression that caused due to how PF_BYTE_LA / PF_L8 format is treated in D3D11, but other than that 2.1 is ready for release.
The morph animation contribution is brand new so that may need a bit more testing.
If you don’t see an SDK that is mostly due to time and knowledge to package an SDK.
If someone else wants to step in and maintain packaging, that is welcomed!
We just tagged the Ogre 1.12 release, making it the new current and recommended version. We would advise you to update wherever possible, to benefit from all the fixes and improvements that made their way into the new release. This release represents 1 year of work from various contributors when compared to the previous 1.11 release. Compared to the last Ogre 1.11 release (1.11.5), however we are only talking about 4 months. Here you will mainly find bugfixes and the architectural changes that justify the version number bump.
For source code and precompiled SDKs, see the download page. Currently the Android is still missing. We will update the download page as it becomes available.
During the period of Feb 27. – March 27. we received 60 replies. At the same time the ogre 1.11.5 Windows SDK alone was downloaded 644 times. So while the results are significant, they are probably not representative.