by spacegaier | Jan 4, 2015 | News
First off: Happy New Year to everyone!
As the old year starts to slowly fade away in our rear view mirror, we want to look back on what 2014 had in store for Ogre3D and at the same time look ahead what 2015 might bring. So strap in for this ride back to the beginning of last year…
Review of 2014
It all started off with one key event early in 2014 when one well-known (at least in Ogre3D circles) Argentinian fellow joined the team: Matias Goldberg. In the last few months he was (and still is) the driving force behind the efforts to develop the revamped Ogre 2.0 version. Without him that would not have been possible in its current form…or more accurately: It would not have been possible…full stop.
The work on Ogre 2.0 was one of the cornerstones in last year’s efforts, but of course the rest of the team was not sitting around idly, but instead focused on Ogre 1.10. The DirectX11 and GL3+ render systems in particular received a lot of attention and will be among the highlights of this upcoming release. More on that later once we arrive back in the present time on our journey through the last 365 days.
Two other notable technical points are the addition of WebGL support to Ogre3D as well as AZDO work:
WebGL / Javascript (Emscripten): From Ogre version 1.10 on, we officially support WebGL. The respective code has already been pushed to the repository. An online demo can be viewed at http://coderabbit.at/webgl/viewer (with an downloadable offline copy being available on our Sourceforge site) and build instruction can be found under the following link: http://coderabbit.at/webgl/viewer/OgreEmscripten.txt.
AZDO: As part of his Ogre 2.0 efforts Matias has been working on optimizing Ogre3D from an AZDO (Almost Zero Driver Overhead) point of view. For now this only covers the GL3+ render system, but will be extended in the future. A dedicated post from Matias will follow, outlining the changes and improvements in more detail.
Of course all that work on the engine itself only makes sense if there is an active community and eco-system actually making use of it. Some projects to showcase are listed below:
So all in all it was another pretty good year for Ogre3D, but we got quite a few things to optimize and change for 2015…and that is where we are back in the present and “put the pedal to the metal” to jump-start into 2015 and all we have planned for it:
Outlook for 2015
One of the first things we want to finish is the go-live of the new Ogre3D website we have planned. This basically entails a face-lift and getting rid of the slightly annoying ad banners. So stay tuned for that.
Another major step will be the release of two new Ogre versions, namely Ogre 1.10 as well as the first Ogre 2.0 CTP (Community Technology Preview). Once we have set the final dates we will let you know via a blog post as well as where to find further details. This especially pertains to Ogre 2.0 for which we want to set up some dedicated sources of information to help with the upcoming transition once 2.x nears its first stable release.
At the same time, the regular development efforts will continue and as always we encourage everyone to chime in wherever possible, by providing feedback and input in the forums, reporting issues on our JIRA tracker and ideally also help solving those by submitting pull-requests for our official source code repository. Additionally, donations are always welcome as well to help managing the infrastructure costs.
This last point nicely leads to another thing we want to tackle this 2015. Go-live of our CI server (Continuous Integration) for automated testing of Ogre3D. Once this is ready to use, we will announce it here as well in a dedicated post.
We of course also hope to participate again in this year’s GSoC after we did not make the cut last year. The preparation for it will begin soon by opening up the discussion in our GSoC forum section regarding interesting potential projects ideas. If you have one, note it down and join in the upcoming idea discussion.
Lastly, we also plan to do another Ogre User Survey to get some insights into the user base along with its priorities and wishes and some information about the usage of our engine in general. As you already guessed: This will also be covered in a dedicated announcement once we survey is open. Prior to it, we will trigger a public discussion in the forums regarding the questions we want to ask. Feel free to join in if you have questions that might be of interested and that you would like to see included in the survey.
That’s about it in terms of what we have planned right now, but as usual we will have to see how things pan out. As usual let us know what you think in the forums…and then let’s get cracking.
by spacegaier | Dec 11, 2014 | News
This time we have something new from the Ogre3D eco system: The Ogre3d based game engine “NeoAxis” has just been released for free.
NeoAxis Group Ltd is glad to announce that the universal 3D development framework NeoAxis 3D Engine is now completely free, as the community has been asking for it. You can freely download the recently published SDK 3.0, which includes all the features previously reserved to Unlimited and Source licences. From now, the engine will developed as free tool. Paid licenses will still give customers access to a bigger part of the engine’s source code.
Licensing Changes
NeoAxis 3D Engine is available in 3 editions, each providing a different level of access to the engine’s source code.
- Free Edition — free development environment, which includes all features of the engine and tools. Includes the ability to expand the engine by creating add-ons.
- Professional Edition — includes the full source code of the engine’s tools and bigger access to the source code of the engine components.
- Source Edition — includes full source code of the engine.
Read the full announcement on the NeoAxis blog.
by spacegaier | May 1, 2014 | News
Dear Ogre community,
in case you missed this thread so far, we want to highlight “MASA LIFE“:
A one-stop middleware for efficiently authoring and simulating behavior
They just released version 1.5 of their product and you can register on their website to receive a trial version. Some of the features it includes are:
- Rapid prototype behaviors/AI
- Visual modeling of reusable behaviors empowering designers with intuitive graphical editors (Behavior Trees, Navigation, Knowledge,…).
- Graphical (remote) debugging & inspection.
- Sparking life: integrate with our cross-platform SDK and deploy easily with a single-click of a button.
- Extensive getting-started experience and documentation.
(more…)
by spacegaier | Feb 25, 2014 | News
Dear community,
Unfortunately, we have to convey sad news for a change: We were not accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code 2014 project.
We don’t know the reason (yet), but there is nothing we can do about it anyway, other than to stand tall and continue our path without funding from Google this year…which will not be the end of course. Instead we will jointly focus on refining and polishing the results of last year’s projects and continue our efforts to integrate them into the main code base as well as pushing forward on Ogre version 2.0.
We also want to highlight that we bear no grudge whatsoever towards Google for their decision. There are so many great projects applying for spots every year that we were lucky to have been consistently chosen for the last several years, often times with as many as four slots in parallel. For that we are very grateful!
Additionally, the fact that we are out this year, doesn’t mean that we are out for good. It’s not our first time we haven’t been granted GSoC slots. We will apply again next year and keep our fingers crossed.
In the meantime, we will rely even more on you as the community to support us with pull-requests and bug hunting (e.g. by creating and working on JIRA tickets) to constantly improve our beloved engine.
Your Ogre3D Team
PS: Everyone of course is more than welcome to tackle one of the GSoC ideas collected here in various threads as well as in our wiki and work on them anyway. Feel free to get in touch with our development team for additional steering, but even more importantly: Involve the community by creating a thread and discussing your idea and approach beforehand, to get some feedback early on.
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
