Good news! We have just added the v1-9-0RC2 tag (commit) to our repository, indicating that we reached our RC2 milestone. Within the next four weeks we will fix any potential major bugs and will then release it on the the 10th November as “stable” to become the new de-jure Ogre version.
Note: As outlined in this version planning thread, we did not include any results of our GSoC 2013 projects in Ogre 1.9 yet, to not delay it any further. This merge will partially happen in the new version Ogre 1.10 and the rest of it in Ogre 2.0 (see the thread for more details and the reasoning behind it).
Since the Ogre 1.10 branch has now been created (commit), we can also officially share its name: Ogre 1.10 aka “Xalafu”. JIRA has been updated to reflect the new branches and versions as well.
Good news!
Some days ago we finally tagged our official source code repository with “v1-9-0RC1” which of course means to we reached a development state that we consider feature-complete for Ogre 1.9. As usual we first release a Release Candidate (RC) version that – if no major issues are found or any upcoming issues were fixed – will be declared final/stable and then become the official current Ogre version. So please: Wherever possible switch to the new version to give it a try and report any issues you find to our Ogre JIRA tracker so that we as the team can tackle them.
The download section has been updated to point to the newly created Ogre 1.9 RC1 SDKs that can be downloaded by those that do not want to build the new version from source themselves. Otherwise, as usual follow these instructions (you need to grab the source directly from our BitBucket repository since we did not prepare any source bundles yet).
Lastly, the mandatory changelog. We will just list some of the major points here, the detailed list can of course as usual be found in the wiki.
Changelog highlights:
New LOD Volume Rendering Component with LOD from GSoC 2012
Terrain Improvements from GSoC 2012
Android platform support
Windows Phone 8 platform support
Windows Metro / WinRT support
OpenGL3+ Render System (still experimental and under heavy development)
Improvements to all Render Systems, e.g. DirectX11 from GSoC 2012
multitude of bug fixes
…
What’s next?
With Ogre 1.9 out of the way we can now focus on the upcoming, major release Ogre 2.0 which will entail a lot of internal core optimizations to get Ogre’s speed up to the levels to be able to compete with other rendering engines. Quite a bit of profiling and brainstorming was already done to get us started. One other big step in that direction will of course be this year’s Google Summer of Code where we will concentrate on those areas (for additional topic proposals see this topic list the dev team compiled). If you want to help, just join into the discussion. We are glad about all the support we can get!
We are very happy to announce that Jim Buck (‘jbuck’ on the forums) has officially joined the Ogre Team. He will mainly take care to establish Ogre in the console area in his new position as Ogre Console Lead.
Jim has been programming in the video games industry since 1996, starting as an employee at Sony and shipping well-known PlayStation franchises such as Twisted Metal and GameDay. His own company, Twitchy Thumbs Entertainment, does contract development, especially in the areas of graphics and porting on most platforms, particularly on consoles, handheld devices, and anyplace where OpenGL has a home. It’s these areas where he feels he can make a contribution as part of the OGRE team.
We’re very pleased to announce that Noam Gat (aka Noman) has officially joined the OGRE team! Noam has been working with and contributing to OGRE for several years now, and was a successful student in our Google Summer of Code programmes for 2008 (geometry shaders) and 2009 (compositor enhancements). Noman will be continuing to build on the compositor work he’s been doing recently, and anything else he happens to fancy having a crack at.
We’re pleased to announce that Holger ‘CABAListic’ Frydrych has officially joined the OGRE Team as maintainer of the CMake build system and Linux platform. CABAListic is a long-time member of the community and has also been responsible for the Editable Terrain Manager add-on in the past. Most recently he’s been instrumental in implementing CMake for improving our build management in the development trunk (which will be in the next major version), and is a regular Linux user so will be the team’s main contact point for that platform.
