They just keep rolling in 🙂 New (or improved) this week are:
As always, great work by all concerned.
There have been a couple of core OGRE team changes this week. nfz has
had to step down for personal reasons, and although he'll still be
around in the community, his contribution to the team will be sorely
missed by everyone.
New to the team this week is Phillip 'pjcast' Castaneda, a long-serving
member of the community who has been responsible for both patches
and add-ons in the past, and whose work most people in the community
will be familiar with, in particular the Object-oriented Input System (OIS) which
will be used in Eihort. I'd like to welcome him to the team on behalf
of everyone!
{mosimage}We're pleased to announce the availability of OGRE 1.2.0 [Dagon] Release Candidate 2! You can find all the downloads in the usual places, this time the updated components include the source, the SDKs, the XSI and Milkshape exporters, the command line tools, and the Visual C++ dependencies (be sure to update those). There are also new precompiled demos for the impatient featuring the visual improvements we've made to a couple of the demos, including lots more compositor effects in the compositor demo.
Details of the changes between RC1 and RC2 are available by accessing the full detail of this post. If you want a list of all the things that are new in 1.2 [Dagon] over 1.0 [Azathoth], see the original RC1 post.
Several new albums have been added to the featured projects area recently, guaranteed to keep your candy-craving eyes fully sated:
Enjoy!
{mosimage}This is a really big day for us. 'Dagon', now known officially as OGRE 1.2.x (we've adopted the 'even numbers mean stable' standard), is now ready for stable release. This means that all external interfaces on this version are now frozen, and we consider it ready for prime time – all interface breaking development will now move to a new branch of CVS, codenamed 'Eihort', and only bugfixes and other non-interface breaking changes will be made to Dagon from now on.
There is an awful lot to be excited about in this release – if you haven't been following it already, see the full detail of this post for the lowdown. Some interfaces have changed since the
1.0.x branch (Azathoth), for full information on porting your
application from the previous version of OGRE, see the Dagon Porting Notes in the OGRE Wiki.
As with the previous stable version, we're going to release two public 'release candidates' to shake out as many of the last-minute kinks as we can before the final. Having said that, many people have been using Dagon from CVS in earnest for some
weeks or even months without issues, which has been a critical part of establishing Dagon as ready for release, so we're not expecting any major issues – just a few little annoying ones, as is par for the course with these things 😉
In the downloads area you will find new versions of the source code, the SDKs, the XSI exporter and command line tools, and precompiled demos. SDKs for Code::Blocks will also be forthcoming in the very near future. Note that if your modelling tool of choice doesn't have a 1.2.x exporter yet, don't worry- you can continue to use the exporters from 1.0.x, it just means your modeller won't support the new Dagon animation features yet.
Lastly, if you use Visual C++, note that we have dropped support for old versions and officially support only VC7.1 (.Net 2003) and VC8 (.Net 2005) with this release. The standards support in older versions of VC++ (especially VC6) was just too bug ridden to tolerate any longer since it was constraining our development, and the upgrade path to VC8 Express is free, so there is no reason to continue to use outdated versions. You also have the choice of Code::Blocks.
We hope you enjoy this new release!
(Those who prefer to use cvs can switch to the Dagon branch by requesting branch 'v1-2' with your cvs client)
{mosimage}Bisco has just sent an update for the Maya exporters (supported versions 6.0, 6.5 and 7.0), which is now available from the Tools Downloads section. This release fixes several bugs and speeds up animation export, full details in the changelog that comes with the release.