by sinbad | Apr 12, 2007 | News
The anxious wait is finally over, and applicants should have received email notifications by now to tell them whether or not they have been successful in this years Google Summer of Code. This year we had 34 applications and were allocated 5 project slots, which we could have populated two to three times over since there were a number of very good applications. Still, decisions are decisions and the 5 we eventually chose are as follows:
Custom Memory Heaps and Object Allocators
Student: Tim Kelsey Mentor: Steve Streeting (sinbad)
High level animation control plugin (including IK support)
Student: Jaroslaw Kochanowicz (jarek108) Mentor: Paul Cheyrou-lagrèze (tuan kuranes)
Emulating Lesser Hardware Capabilities
Student: Juozas Gaigalas (juozasg) Mentor: Daniel Wickert (haffax)
Advanced Script Compilers
Student: Brian Johnstone (Praetor) Mentor: Andres Carrera (Lioric)
Material Editor
Student: Brian Hudson (Hudson) Mentor: Casey Borders (CaseyB)
Congratulations to all the students that were accepted – but of course now the real work begins 😉 Thanks also to everyone who took the time to apply, we’re sorry we couldn’t accept everyone who put in a good application.
Because we had more volunteer mentors than project assignments, Michael Reimpell (reimpell), Jesús María Alonso Abad (Kencho) and Gregory Junker (xavier) will be around as supporting / backup mentors. And of course, the entire community is encouraged to get involved in the review of the projects as they develop, through our community forums.
I will be setting up a new area in the wiki for the successful projects, and contacting students and mentors later today to let them know about procedures and next steps. Good luck to all our students!
by sinbad | Apr 4, 2007 | News
{mosimage}EDM Studio has just made available the first release of HoudiniOgre, a plug-in which enables you to export OGRE-compatible assets from Houdini, Side Effect Software’s powerful, procedurally-oriented digital content creation tool. Currently the exporter is only provided for the Windows platform, but a Linux version will be available shortly. To help you get a flavour for it, they’ve put together a short video “Advanced Houdini for Ogre Users in 10 minutes”, to give you a whistle-stop tour of the sort of things Houdini can do, and how the exporter works.
The exporter is free for non-commercial use, as is Houdini Apprentice. For details of a commercial license please contact EDM Studio for more details.
by sinbad | Mar 25, 2007 | News
{mosimage}Yes, the time has finally arrived – OGRE 1.4.0, aka ‘Eihort’, is now deemed to be a final stable release! This means that 1.4.x is now our officially supported version, having passed relatively unscathed through 2 release candidates to get to this stage. If you were holding off updating before, we strongly recommend you update now since there will be no more releases on the Dagon (1.2) branch from this point onwards. As mentioned previously, please read the Eihort Porting Notes for advice on how to upgrade your applications.
For details on what’s new in Eihort over Dagon, please see the original 1.4.0 RC1 announcement. In the full detail of this post you will find the changes in this version since the last release candidate, RC2.
Please note that this release now features updated tools and also a new SDK for Mac OSX. We hope you enjoy using OGRE!
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by sinbad | Mar 15, 2007 | News
We just heard today that OGRE has been approved as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code 2007, which is great news. We participated in 2006 and it resulted in a very busy summer for several people, but it was a very rewarding and productive experience, so we’re glad to be taking part again. For those who have been living under a rock and don’t know what the Summer of Code is:
" Google Summer of CodeTM is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period."
So there you go – if you’re a student, you can actually get paid to contribute to OGRE over the summer, how’s that for a deal?
Google are now accepting student applications and you should take a look at our Ideas List when deciding on what project to submit an application for. All the information you need to know about the programme is available from Google’s site but you can also discuss the Summer of Code in our dedicated forum which is there from last year.
Important: Bear in mind that participating in the SoC requires a lot of communication and collaboration with the community, it’s not a case of going away and working alone on an OGRE-related project for a few months. You will be expected to develop your code in the open, talk frequently about it, answer questions and generally interact regularly with the wider community – basically precisely what we do here on the OGRE project every day 🙂 And that’s the point – this is about learning what it’s like to participate in an open source community, not about working on a private project for the summer.
We’re very grateful once again to Google for including us in this great programme.
by sinbad | Mar 14, 2007 | News
{mosimage}New versions of the LEXIExporter for 3DS Max and the LEXIViewer have been released thanks to those nice people at NDS (formerly ITE Aps). You can find both on the Tools download page. This release fixes several bugs, adds pose (blended vertex) animation for both export and viewing, and addresses a number of issues raised by the community.
Please note that LEXIView is currently compatible with the Dagon (1.2.x) branch only. Meshes exported from LEXIExporter are also in Dagon format but if you use Eihort they will be upgraded automatically on loading. After Eihort (1.4.0) emerges from release candidate status as a final release, which will be in a little under 2 weeks, there should be further updates.
by sinbad | Mar 13, 2007 | News
As you’ve no doubt noticed, we have a new site design! (You might have to hit ‘refresh’ to get everything up to date) We hope you like it – as well as giving the site a visual makeover, having had the previous setup for 2 years, we have deliberately focussed on making navigation around the site easier and more obvious to new users, particularly the download and documentation areas.
Not only is it a new site, but it’s also running on a brand new server, which has a larger capacity and a more robust support infrastructure than before. We hope this will mean that the site will continue to repond well to users even under the increasing load caused by ever-increasing interest in OGRE, particularly once the EIhort release becomes a final, stable version in a little under 2 weeks. This investment reflects our confidence that OGRE hasn’t stopped growing yet!
Big thanks go out to Kezzer for providing lots of assistance with graphical elements of the site design, and to our early testers for their proof reading and suggestions.
