I’ve added a new game to the Featured Projects area, Tranz Oz. Written by monster (a familiar face in the forums and also the author of OgreODE), it’s been entered into the Retro Remakes competition this year. We wish it the best of luck! After the competition, there will be a downloadable demo and source code, so watch this space.
I just received word that 3D Object Converter, a shareware tool for converting between lots of different mesh formats, has added support for Ogre’s XML format (.mesh.xml). It could be a useful tool for those of you wanting to convert from other file formats without using a modeller, since the resulting XML can be fed through OgreXMLConverter to produce a runtime binary mesh.
Thanks to (another) quality patch from nfz, Ogre now supports the Open GL Shading Language, or GLSL for short.
This means that Ogre now supports every shader syntax available for consumer graphics cards today, including all 3 high-level languages (Cg, HLSL and GLSL) as well as the many assembler syntaxes (for both Dx9 and GL). Big thanks to nfz for his great work on this.
This feature is available in CVS, please try it out if you’re a bleeding-edge user. Others will have to wait until 0.15 is released, which should be fairly soon.
Chrid sent word that “Tank Wars”, a commercial Ogre-based game, goes live at 13:20 on 30 August – on Finnish TV.
Players control their tanks on the show using text messaging. You can view screenshots in our featured projects area, and view the original announcement from Chrid here.
Also note that Supremacy, another commercial game using Ogre, is out of beta and is likely to hit the shelves in the next month or two. Thanks to all the producers of these games for showing their faith in Ogre by basing their product on us!
Splintered Kingdoms has been added to our list of Featured Projects; as many of you already know this is a small-scale MMORPG project run as a final year degree project, fronted by DrEvil. It’s shaping up to be a good combination of code and art talent, so be sure to take a look at their website too.
Yes, it’s maintenance release time again. You can find a new stable release in the Downloads Area, under the Source Releases | Stable Releases section. You’ll also find some updated tools in the Tools section. Full details of the changes in this release are available in the Change Log.
Important – a last-minute bug sneaked through; if you get a compile error under gcc with your download, apply this patch. The release has already been fixed so new downloaders should not have a problem.