We’re pleased to announce that Nir Hasson has joined the OGRE Team! Now, those of you who have been in the community for a while all know Nir anyway, and also know that he’s been contributing code directly for a while, particularly his RTShaderSystem component for generating shaders which made its debut in Ogre 1.7. As such, he’s been operating as a member of the team in all but name for some time, and he’s only held off accepting an official badge because his plans for the immediate future were uncertain.
So, we’re glad that he’s agreed to join the team officially now – welcome aboard Nir! In practice it’s business as usual, but he has his well-deserved official badge now 🙂
Ogre’s been going for almost 10 years now, and in all this time we’ve never had an official mascot character. Well, now we do! 🙂
Zi Ye (aka ‘omniter’) has been with us since Google Summer of Code 2009, and has proven himself not only skilled in the art of coding, but also skilled in the art of.. well, art! He took it upon himself to create an animated character in the spirit of Ogre, and has clearly succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.
Zi has named the new character ‘Sinbad’, and modelled him on a hybrid of our original Ogre logo and that of a certain well-known sea-faring character, whose name Steve Streeting, the founder and project lead of Ogre, adopted as his development & community alias many, many years ago. He has animations for idling (strangely my personal favourite because it exudes so much character), walking, jumping, drawing and putting away his swords, 2 types of attack and, curiously, a dance routine 🙂 He stars in a new sample where he can be controlled by the user, which demonstrates character control and also using tag points to attach related items (the swords) to a skeleton.
This will all be included in the next release of Ogre 1.7, or you can access it now from the 1.7 Subversion branch. There’s also a video available of a slightly earlier version of the demo. ‘Sinbad’ is available for free use in other applications too so long as you don’t try to charge money for him.
Huge thanks to Zi for doing this! If you want to congratulate him yourself, here’s his development thread on the subject.
This week marks the release of Zero Gear, the fun kart-racing game from NimbleBit that uses Ogre for rendering. Here’s their press release:
January 12th marks the official release date of the PC kart game Zero Gear by NimbleBit! For the low price of only $19.99 you can beat up your friends in 18 different levels, in customizable karts and characters. Play with physically based weapons, earn achievements and compete in many different game modes.
To help get you into the actions with your friends, Zero Gear is also offered in a 4-pack for $39.99. Thats 50% off each copy!
Still not satisfied? Take your friends and try the full game for FREE this entire week! Zero Gear will be free to play on Steam until Jan. 18th! If you are STILL on the fence, lets keep it 25% off for the entire week. Get Zero Gear now or be sorry later!!11!
We said we’d try to get this out before the end of the year, and with only hours to spare we just about made it! OGRE 1.7 has been under development for over a year now, and the time has come to draw a line under it and get it shipped as a brand new stable version. Unlike the maintenance releases we’ve been issuing regularly for 1.6, this release includes a huge number of new features and enhancements, of which the headliners are listed after the jump. Edit: I forgot to mention that this release makes official our transition to the MIT License – we’ve been using it in Subversion for a while so it slipped my mind that this is the first ‘official’ release under that license. So that’s news!
As usual, plenty of people have been testing it direct from Subversion for a while now, but even so we’re issuing it as a Release Candidate to begin with. Due to time constraints, we’re also only issuing this as a source release for the moment – prebuilt SDKs will follow in a second Release Candidate or the final.
We just thought we’d sneak this one in before the end of the year! OGRE v1.6.5 is now officially released, which will most likely be the final official maintenance release of the v1.6 (‘Shoggoth’) branch. As usual it’s a stability and bugfix release for those in production environments, full details of which are available after the jump. All of the fancy new goodies are saved for 1.7 which should be out in Release Candidate form very shortly – or right now if you want to access our repository before the official release.
French 3D specialist site 3d-test.com have just posted an interview with our David ‘masterfalcon’ Rogers, where he talks about the Ogre iPhone port (in English :)). Recommended reading if you’re interested in iPhone and iPod Touch development with Ogre.
Thanks to 3d-test.com for running this interview and to David for doing such a great job on it.
