by sinbad | May 14, 2004 | News
Yes, 0.14 is here, after a little last-minute wrangling! This is another major release, please read the ChangeLog for the lowdown of what is in it for you. We all think you’ll be rather pleased with what you find.
Download The Precompiled Demos (Windows Only)
Download The Source
Download The Tools
by sinbad | May 12, 2004 | News
It’s always the way, isn’t it? I’m here with 0.14 all packed up and ready to go, and then someone tells me that the GeForce Ti seems to have some odd problems with shadows under D3D (or more specifically, the infinite far plane projection Ogre uses to create robust volumes); to me it looks like driver error, but I can’t be sure. It’s fine in GL on those cards, and my test cards (FX5900, Radeon 9600, Radeon Mobility 9000) are fine in Dx9, but there you go.
I’m going to release anyway (tomorrow now, since it’s late) since I’m flying blind while I can’t recreate the problem, but if you have a Ti card and you use D3D, I could use any diagnostics you can gather, do it in this forum thread.
[Edit]We managed to get some good test data so we’re fixing the GeForce3/4 with a finite (rather than infinite) extrusion program in D3D9, release will follow in the next couple of days when that is fully tested[/Edit]
by sinbad | Apr 24, 2004 | News
Yes, it’s very nearly release time again! Of course the main (but not the only) new feature in 0.14 is shadows – 2 shadow techniques have been in the cvs version for a few weeks now and the testing has been quite extensive, so those are certainly ready for prime time. They are modulative stencil shadows (darkening shadows), and additive stencil shadows (masked lighting, which is more realistic but also more complex, especially when you combine it with an already highly flexible material framework!).
Texture based shadows are in development, I aim to get at least one texture based technique ready for the release (modulative projective texture shadows), and I’ll do my best to get two (the other is shadowmaps, which need to be fragment program based to run on all cards).
The target for 0.14 is sometime in the next 2 weeks, so brace yourself. 🙂
by sinbad | Apr 9, 2004 | News
The community is as active as ever, here’s a few highlights:
- psyclonist has launched Yake, a small, flexible, cross-platform game engine / application framework licensed under the LGPL. It uses Ogre for graphics, ODE for physics, OpenAL for sound, and Lua for scripting.
- pjcast has written a video plugin which allows you to play movies through textures, useful for playing intros or even doing realtime movie billboards.
- KayNine has written a ragdoll editor which allows you to set up your ragdoll rigs visually and export them to a file. He needs testers so join in if you’re interested in ragdolls!
- Xorekis has been busy writing tutorials, there are 2 new tutorials in CVS now, and I’ll be putting them up here on the website soon, thanks to him for that.
- wumpus has taken over maintenance of Gtk support, and has started posting some nice pictures of running multiple embedded Ogre windows inside Gtk apps, which will be very useful for those wanting to write cross-platform tools.
- Godot has taken over maintenance of the Oasis framework (in ogreaddons), which also pulls together scripting, sound, physics and Ogre’s graphics, and he is busy extending it.
It’s hard to keep up with all you guys! 🙂
by sinbad | Mar 26, 2004 | News
This news page has been a bit quiet, but there’s plenty going on as those who frequent the forums will know. For those who don’t, here are some of the things the current CVS copy supports over and above 0.13.x so far:
- Hardware skinning – based on vertex programs it’s now very easy to use hardware skinning on your meshes, which improves performance especially for large meshes. Ogre intelligently falls back on software skinning if the graphics card cannot do it, or you haven’t bound a skeletally-aware vertex program to the material you use. You can mix and match hardware and software skinning for the same mesh too.
- Shadow framework – modulative stencil shadows are done, and additive shadows will be done very soon. We use all kinds of nice features like 2-sided stencilling and flipping between zpass and zfail algorithms to try to maximise the performance, there are still some more optimisation tricks I want to add too. I’m aiming to do persepctive-adjusted shadowmaps in time for 0.14 (fingers crossed), since they look great and are much more GPU friendly than stencil shadows anyway.
- Rationalisation of Camera / Frustum / SceneNode methods – you can now have SceneNodes track other SceneNodes automatically, and use the same fixed yaw features available on Camera in SceneNode. This makes it incredibly trivial to do things like make a gun turrent which automatically tracks a target
- Improved flexibility of skeleton structures – we’ve made it much easier to take manual control of entire skeletons, which will help all the people making ragdoll simulations (of which there are 3 now)
- Introduced a new ‘temp buffer licensing scheme’ which allows objects to ‘check out’ temporary copies of buffers when they need them (e.g. for software skinning), but not hold them permanently; they are returned to a shared pool. This is important to allow objects to maintain temporary results within a frame for other processes, without having to dedicate a temporary buffer to every object exclusively (which would be a memory hog). This allows larger numbers of objects in the scene without having a linear effect on memory.
As you can see, we’re working feverishly to make 0.14 yet another milestone release for Ogre. Stay tuned…
by sinbad | Mar 26, 2004 | News
Last year, TU Delft university successfully used Ogre as part of one of their CS courses; at the time they voiced the intention of using it again in the future, and I’ve just heard that indeed they are.
I’m sure they’ll soon find they have even more toys to play with this time around. 🙂 We wish them luck, and look forward to seeing this years student projects.
