by Matias Goldberg | Apr 5, 2015 | News
This is dark_sylinc writing again! Wanna know what we’ve been up to? Well, here it comes:
1. Improved shadow mapping quality. The PCF code I used was some snippet I had lying around since 2008. I now finally sat down and implemented better approaches.
Before:
After (same quality):
After (highest quality):
You can look in the forum thread for more information. Some community members have also posted more snippets with different filters. Some of these other filters may be provided out of the box eventually.
2. Hot reloading of Hlms shader templates: This has been supported for a while, but never publicly mentioned and the microcode cache could get in the way. This is very useful for more productive development, iteration, and debugging of Hlms shader files. In the samples, hit Ctrl+F1 to reload the PBS shaders and Ctrl+F2 to reload the Unlit shaders.
3. Fixed lots, lots and lots of D3D11 errors: Back in the previous report, we’ve described that DX11 had been ported. But there were still crashes lingering around, low level materials weren’t working, lots of texturing and mipmapping errors, huge memory leaks, and many other misc. errors. We’re happy and proud to say they’ve been fixed. There’s probably a few more bugs around waiting to be discovered and fixed…just like everything else.
4. Ogre 2.1 tested on Intel cards! I’ve only tested on an Intel HD 4600 so far and for GL3+ to work you will need the very latest drivers. Intel’s D3D11 support has always been significantly superior, and Ogre is no exception to that rule. If you intend to target the Intel market share of GPUs, shipping with D3D11 is a requirement.
Note: Remember that for other vendors, GL3+ can improve performance significantly over D3D11 as well! Don’t assume one particular API is superior for everybody!
Aside from these features, we’ve been fixing bugs, improving stability, improving documentation and tweaking the engine based on community feedback (thank you guys!). Ogre 2.1 keeps getting better every day.
Two community members made an awesome forum post where they took our PBS shaders and modified them to get a similar look to Marmoset Toolbag 2 (a non-Ogre-related 3rd-party tool for editing physically based materials). We’re looking forward into evaluating their improvements and integrating them into Ogre 2.1. We believe that the interoperability with industry-standard 3rd party tools such as Marmoset is key for the future of Ogre. You’ll probably hear from us about this in the next report, or the next to that one.
Well, that’s all for now. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to my cave 🙂 …
by spacegaier | Jan 1, 2014 | News
First off: We as the Ogre3D team wish the the whole Ogre3D community a Happy New Year!
Looking back at 2013, we see a successful year for our beloved rendering engine, with two highlights being yet another great Google Summer of Code and the release of Ogre 1.9. And the new year 2014 is also having a great start, since we can happily announce that we have a new superb addition to our development team:
So here it is: Matias Goldberg joins the team!
Everyone following the development of Ogre3D will by now be familiar with Matias, since he is the driving force behind the whole Ogre 2.0 revamp. It all started off with his in-depth analysis of Ogre’s performance bottlenecks in November 2012, followed by his Ogre 2.0 GSoC project to start fixing those in the Summer of 2013. But as promised he did not stop there, but continues to work hard on the v2-0 branch. You can follow his work either directly via his commits to the repositories, his blog posts related to Ogre, the Ogre 2.0 wiki page or various forum threads covering a variety of topics in the Ogre 2.0+ forum section. We of course encourage everyone to get involved and provide feedback.
BTW: Merging in the first three GSoC projects that we selected for the next Ogre version 1.10, will take a bit longer than anticipated, so we cannot yet release the first release candidate as originally planned for right around now, but instead we will push that RC1 back a few weeks. The overall branch quality will also benefit from that since it gives us more time to have a look at some open JIRA tickets and helps to get the code base into a mature enough state.
As usual: All community support is welcome! So if you can, please jump on board, to ensure that 2014 becomes yet another successful year for all of us!
Your Ogre3D Team
by spacegaier | Jun 7, 2012 | News
As promised in one of the last blog posts, we were going to publish a draft of our roadmap for Ogre 1.9 and 2.0, once we aligned internally. This moment has now come and we would really like your feedback on whether you agree with the listed items and also comment on their priority from your point of view.
Once this high level planning is completed, we will also need to think about ways to enhance our development processes and how to implement the planned changes in the most smooth way possible. This discussion also has been started partially, but for now we need to set the big goals and then afterwards we can break them down.
So here is the forum thread with planned changes for Ogre 1.9 and 2.0: Roadmap draft for Ogre 1.9 and 2.0
We are really looking forward to your feedback, so we hope to also see you in the discussion!
Your Ogre3D Team
by betajaen | Jan 16, 2011 | News
Over the last two weeks Ogre has been a beehive of activity. Here are a number of notable events:
On a side note: Our papercut initiative is coming along well with many, many submissions, but of course there can never be enough! So keep them coming!
by sinbad | Mar 12, 2010 | News
I’ve linked my Twitter account from the OGRE Team page for a while now, but I’ve been told that’s not really obvious enough!
So, if you want to follow my tweets related to OGRE, graphics & tech in general, and occasionally some random other stuff, here’s my Twitter page. In the interests of making it easier to find in future, I’ve added a link to the navigation bar on the left too.
Enjoy!
