Today’s guest post is from Ogre3D, one of this week’s front-page featured projects.
As our Ogre3D project was selected as one of the featured “Sourceforge Projects of the Week” (together with a list of various other great communities), we were given the opportunity for a featured guest post on the SF.net blog and of course we could not pass up that chance. Therefore, in the following lines we will try to quickly introduce you to our project (in case you hadn’t heard of it before) and point out some of the newer developments (in case you know our project already, but have either lost touch or just need a refresher). So here we go…
Ogre3D – What’s that?
Ogre3D is a free, open-source, object-oriented rendering engine as the name indicates once you decrypt it: OGRE = Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine. It was created by Steve Streeting back in 2001 who spear-headed the development team for many years, before retiring in 2010 as the official face. You might also know him as the creator of SourceTree (highly acclaimed Git and Hg client, originally only for Mac but now also available for PC) and nowadays as an employee over at Atlassian.
Today, Ogre3D supports a wide variety of different platforms thanks to the fact that it can run with Direct3D (D3D9 and D3D11) as well as different OpenGL variants (OpenGL 3+, OpenGL ES & ES 2). We currently cover Windows (incl. support for Win8/WinRT with Metro), Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8 as officially supported platforms. This means you basically only have to develop your application core once and then just need to take care of some platform dependent things such as input or window/application handling in general.
Apart from the core engine there is also a vibrant eco system of wrappers/extensions/plugins that help to create a complete set/tool-chain around Ogre3D, including:
- Wrappers to all major physics engines
- Various GUI library integrations as well as pure Ogre3D ones
- Importer and exporter for all major modeling tools and formats
- Highly specialized plugins e.g. for realistic water and sky rendering
- etc.
Ogre3D – Who’s using it?
We are proud to say that our engine is used in a wide variety of different projects and genres, ranging from the classic gaming sector (desktop and mobile) to virtual reality applications and scientific simulations. To give you a quick impression we listed some of the more recent and notable creations below:
- Torchlight I & II: Highly acclaimed game developed by a veteran team composed of the designers and leads of projects like Diablo, Diablo II, Mythos, etc. and is by far the most successful title with Ogre3D (Torchlight 1 went platinum in early 2011)
- Family Farm / Goods Folks: Cartoonish 3D family simulation by Hammerware Studios
- Salvation Prophecy: Military space game with space simulation and third person shooter elements
- Anomalous Medical: A medial framework based around the human head, meaning that it offers a very detailed and anatomically correct model of a human head that you can move around, look into and examine in various other ways.
- Others include: Proun, Garshasp – Monster Slayer, ZombieDriver, Victory – Age of Racing, Venetica, Book of Unwritten Tales, GolfBlaster3D, MotorM4X, etc.
Ogre3D – Who’s doing the magic?
Ogre3D is nowadays maintained and developed by a dedicated team of core members each one focusing on different areas of expertise, as well as a number of highly regarded contributors working on various aspects of the engine or supplying patches or bug reports on our Ogre3D JIRA tracker for any issues they might find. And of course there is a great team of forum admins and moderators along with community helpers who try to answer as many questions as possible and assist wherever they can.
Ogre3D – What’s going on right now?
Right now, we are in the process of releasing the first release candidate for our next major version Ogre3D 1.9, which will be the first official release containing proper Android and Direct3D11 support, as well as the Windows Phone 8 integration that Nokia and Microsoft provided us with. That new version will also contain all the great additions and improvements produced by our four Google Summer of Code students from last year.
We have also been approved by Google for GSoC 2013 and are currently in the process of looking for highly qualified and motivated students, since for the next release Ogre 2.0 we will have to do some heavy refactoring and restructuring in the core of the rendering logic to boost performance to new heights.
Ogre3D – Where to check it out?
Well, obviously there is information here on Sourceforge as well as the downloads for our SDK versions, but apart from that there of course is our homepage www.ogre3d.org which provides some further information, but probably the most informative space and also the most vibrant would be our great forums at www.ogre3d.org/forums as well as our addon section (for e.g. physic wrappers, GUI libraries, Ogre3D extensions, etc.) at www.ogre3d.org/addonforums. And for everyone looking for some tutorials to get started or some code snippets for common tasks, have a look at our community wiki which should get you going.
If you need to directly get in touch with the development or admin team, we would kindly refer you to the contact details on www.ogre3d.org/contact.
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