by sinbad | Oct 25, 2007 | News
It’s been far too long since I did one of these posts, and the community has been very active – so here’s a few cherry-picked items of news from the OGRE ecosystem. Apologies in advance to anyone I don’t mention, I’m guaranteed to miss some!
- PagedGeometry hits 1.0 – JohnJ’s great system for rendering enormous rolling forests / grasslands complete with swaying foliage has now reached the 1.0 milestone. It’s a superb add-on and it’s also open source, we host it in the ogreaddons area.
- Kong released – SpaceDude and his team have produced a really fun and exceptionally well-polished top-down multiplayer shooter featuring brightly coloured monkeys. What more could you want?
- MOTORM4X announced – a fantastic looking off-road racing game from The Easy Company in Prague
- NeoAxis 0.5 released – betauser’s game engine based on OGRE continued to evolve
- ThunderWheels demo – luis and his team at GBoot Games have released a playable demo of their Super Off Road-inspired racer
- Jack Keane released – it should be hitting the store shelves around now in multiple languages, the latest adventure game using OGRE from Deck13
- PolyVoxSceneManager got an update, the fully destructible voxel scene manager, now with adaptive triangle decimation
- CloudWright, a system for generating realistic skyboxes using OGRE, was spotted and admired
- MyGui joins the ranks of GUI systems available for OGRE, in addition to CEGui, BetaGUI, QuickGUI, RBGui and OpenGUI
Once again, apologies for any omissions. There are also fairly regular updates in the Featured Projects Gallery and the Showcase Forum where new projects pop their heads over the parapet all the time, so keep an eye out there.
Thanks to everyone in the OGRE community, who continue to surprise and delight with what they come up with. 🙂
by sinbad | Oct 22, 2007 | News
{mosimage}Dare to be Digital is the UK’s premier video games creation competition for students, and several of the entrants this year (4 of the 12 teams in fact) used OGRE as a basis for their graphics. We originally announced this earlier in the year in respect of their presence at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Even better news is that out of the 4 awards available, projects using OGRE won 3 of them. Winners also get shortlisted for the BAFTA ‘Ones to Watch’ Award so no doubt the teams will be heading to London this week for that. Congratulations to all involved!
by sinbad | Oct 14, 2007 | News
Praetor (aka Brian Johnstone) will be a familiar face to most of you in the community, having been around OGRE for a couple of years now. He was a student for OGRE in the Google Summer of Code this year and has been doing some great work on script compiler technology, which he will be continuing with for the future 1.6 release (Shoggoth), and you may have seen the discussions going on in the forum as for the kind of directions the work will be going in.
As of today he’s been added as a full member of the OGRE Team. Welcome Praetor!
by sinbad | Sep 30, 2007 | News
{mosimage}Yes, the stable ‘Eihort’ branch of OGRE has had another maintenance release today, in the form of version 1.4.5. As usual there are a number of non-interface breaking changes and bugfixes an all users of the stable version are advised to upgrade as soon as possible. Full details of the precise fixes included are made available in the full detail of this post.
Of particular interest in this release is a change to the Mac OS X build structure, both in the source release and the SDK. We no longer require you to install any frameworks in /Library/Frameworks and indeed our samples now embed dependencies inside the .app structure, to allow the applications to be deployed as a drag & drop solution as is more common on OS X. If you’re on OS X please take note of these changes and remove Ogre.framework any of our dependency frameworks from your /Library/Frameworks folder. If you’re using the source release, there is a new dependencies download for OS X so please ensure you download that for use with the 1.4.5 source release.
Head over to the downloads area to get the release.
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by sinbad | Sep 20, 2007 | News
{mosimage}NDS have just released a new version of their exporter for 3DS Max 9 whicih can be obtained from the tools download area. New features in this version:
- Export of scene (Courtesy: Marty Rabens)
- Export of node animations into seperate file
- Export of submeshes optimized. (Courtesy: jwatte)
- User defined Binding Pose for skeleton animated meshes
Thanks to NDS as usual for their support!
by sinbad | Aug 22, 2007 | News
{mosimage}Consummate software writers Deitel & Deitel have just released a new edition of C++ How To Program, published by Prentice Hall, and this time one of the additions is a sizeable chapter on using OGRE and CaseyB’s OgreAL to make a simple game of Pong. The C++ How To Program series is very popular, selling over a quarter of a million copies, which is reflected in the fact that this is the sixth edition of the book. The book is often used in colleges to teach C++ programming from the ground up, which is reflected in the pedagogical way it is written and the fact that it has lots of exercises. It’s a monster too, clocking in at a desk-straining 1200 pages.
This is good news for OGRE since it brings us som more mainstream exposure with people just getting into programming. I (Sinbad) reviewed the drafts of the chapter before publication and I was impressed by the Deitel’s writing style, such as how they were able to get a lot of information across in a relatively small space, yet in an approachable fashion. I’d like to thank the Deitels and Prentice Hall for choosing to include OGRE in the latest edition of this very popular series.
