Qantm College in Brisbane, Australia are celebrating another successful year in which their student game projects used Ogre. Their teacher and veteran Ogre user Kojack posted some new screenshots from their 2008 projects in our forum, and once again they’re looking great.
Impressively one of the projects, ‘Debug’, won the Game Connect Asian Pacific 2008 Best Indie Game contest – which incredibly makes 3 annual wins in a row of this award by Qantm with Ogre-based projects, and 4 wins in the last 5 years (only in 2005 were they pipped to the post).
Hearty congratulations to the students and everyone at Qantm involved in these projects!
Following a period of ‘bedding in’ as a Release Candidate, we’ve now released OGRE v1.6 as the new, official stable version for all users. If you haven’t upgraded from v1.4.x yet, now would be a good time to start investigating whether you want to (hint: you probably do), and you should consult the Porting Notes for tips on how to do so. Here’s a reminder of the main new feature points in v1.6 over v1.4:
New more powerful script compilers
Geometry shaders in OpenGL
Antialiasing on render textures as well as windows
Source releases and most of the SDKs are available to download now; check the release dates and if your SDK isn’t up to date yet, it will be in the next few days (you can always use the source release if you’re impatient – it’s the connoisseur’s choice anyway). We hope you enjoy the new release!
Since we promote open source solutions like Ogre for use in the games industry, we just thought we’d bring your attention to the following event being held in Londong next week:
Open Source for Game Developers – A Debate on New Business Models
Tues 28th October 2008 at Westminster Kingsway College, London
If you’re a games developer (or want to be one) get down to this free event, which is part of London Games Fringe. Join the debate about the open-source gaming arena – bedroom programmers or serious contenders for big business.
The panel of speakers includes the man known to many as the ‘Father of the European PlayStation’, Chris Deering. Chris is joined by independent and corporate video games developers and a specialist lawyer. There will be drinks and networking afterwards.
This is just a reminder to those who haven’t yet completed the OGRE 2008 User Survey – the survey will be closing on Saturday 7th September, 18:00 GMT, so if you could spare 5 minutes of your time to let us know about you & your team before then, we’d really appreciate it.
Again I’ll stress that you don’t have to provide any identifying information if you don’t want to, although if you’re willing it would be nice to tell us a little about who you are. It’s always good to know our user base! If you do choose to provide contact information we will not pass it on without your permission.
The information collected in this survey will be used to hopefully gain support resources from external companies when we need them, such as hardware manufacturers and ISVs; after all if we can demonstrate the size & maturity of our user base (potentially including their customers / partners), they are more likely to be able to allocate support resources our way.
The time has finally arrived for us to unveil the new major version of OGRE as a Release Candidate, OGRE 1.6 aka ‘Shoggoth’. We’re very proud of all the enhancements you can find in this release, which include among many, many other things:
New more powerful script compilers
Geometry shaders in OpenGL
Antialiasing on render textures as well as windows
sRGB gamma correction
Alpha to coverage support
New ‘Portal Connected Zone’ SceneManager
Parallel-Split Shadow Map support
Improved tangent generation
Skeletal blend masks
New background loading options
Custom memory allocator support
That’s merely a small selection of the changes and improvements in OGRE 1.6, the full list can be found in the Changelog and advice on upgrading your applications to the new version can be found in the Porting Notes.
The source releases are available to download now, and the prebuilt SDKs will be being progressively updated in the next few days. There may be a few teething issues since this is merely a Release Candidate, but many people have been using 1.6 from Subversion for a while so hopefully this process shouldn’t take too long. We hope you enjoy this new release of OGRE!
One of the questions I always get asked when talking to other people in the industry is ‘How many people are using OGRE then?’. Compared to regular closed-source software where people can’t use it unless they pay, it’s hard for us to answer this question accurately, apart from pointing at download statistics (approximate 40,000 per month, if you were wondering). However, this doesn’t necessarily reflect how many people are seriously using OGRE.
So, why does it matter? Quite aside from it being nice to know, the practical reason is that the size of the user base influences how 3rd parties perceive us, and specifically how much priority is assigned to support requests we place with 3rd parties such as graphics card manufacturers and driver writers. Put simply, if we can show we have a large number of companies using OGRE for serious projects, the more resources we can get assigned to our support requests.
Since ‘gating’ downloads with forms requiring contact information is both undesirable and impractical in an open-source project, I’m instead running a survey to try to collect this information. It’s not perfect of course, since as an opt-in process it will ‘undersample’ the number of people using OGRE, but I’m hoping it will be enough. Please participate if you’re a serious OGRE user – the survey is short and sweet, and you don’t have to provide any identifying information if you don’t want to. However, if you are able, I would ask you to opt-in to provide a bit more information like your company name and projects, since having specific companies and projects to refer to can probably help our cause.
