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{{Infobox Software| name = OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine)| logo = | screenshot =| caption =| developer = The OGRE Team| latest_release_version = 1.4.5 (Eihort)| latest_release_date =
September 30,
2007| genre = [game engine| license = GNU Lesser General Public License| website = www.ogre3d.org-->
OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D rendering engine (as opposed to a game engine) written in C++ designed to make it easier and intuitive for developers to produce applications utilising hardware-accelerated
3D computer graphics. The class library abstracts the details of using the underlying system libraries like
Direct3D and
OpenGL and provides an interface based on world objects and other high level classes.
The engine is
free software, licensed under the
GNU Lesser General Public License and has a very active community. It has been used in some commercial games. It was Sourceforge's project of the month in March 2005.{{cite web|url=http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2005-03.php|title=SourceForge: Project of the Month|quote=March 2005 OGRE-->
1.0.0 "
Azathoth" was released in February 2005, the current release in the 1.x.y series is 1.4.5 "Eihort" (September 2007).
General Information
As its name states, OGRE is "just" a rendering engine. As such, its main purpose is to provide a general solution for graphics rendering. Though it also comes with other facilities (vector and matrix classes, memory handling, etc.), they are considered supplemental. It is not an all-in-one solution in terms of game development or simulation as it doesn't provide audio or physics support, for instance.
Generally, this is thought of as the main drawback of OGRE, but it could also be seen as a feature of the engine. The choice of OGRE as a graphics engine allows developers the freedom to use whatever physics, input, audio and other libraries they want and allows the OGRE development team to focus on graphics rather than distribute their efforts amongst several systems. OGRE explicitly supports the OIS, SDL and CEGUI libraries, and includes the Cg toolkit.
Currently OGRE is published under a dual license (one being
LGPL, the other one called
OGRE Unrestricted License (OUL)), to make it possible to be chosen for console development as well, because most of the publishers reject using free/
open-source software software in that particular market.
Features
OGRE has an object oriented design with a
plugin architecture that allows easy addition of features, thus making it highly modular.
OGRE is a
scene graph based engine, with support for a wide variety of scene managers, most notably octree, Binary space partitioning and a
Paging Landscape scene manager, along with a beta-stage
portal (computer graphics)-based scene manager under ongoing development.
OGRE is fully multi-platform, with
OpenGL and Direct3D support. It allows to render the same content on different platforms without the content creator having to take into consideration the different capabilities of each platform. This reduces the complexity of deploying a game on multiple systems. Currently pre-compiled binaries exist for
Linux, Mac OS X, and all major versions of Microsoft Windows.
OGRE also supports Vertex and Fragment programs along with custom shaders written in GLSL,
HLSL,
Cg programming language and
Assembly language.
The landscape scene manager has support for Progressive Level of detail (programming), which can be automatically or manually created.
The animation engine has full support for hardware weighted multiple bone skinning, which can be fixed across several poses for full pose mixing.
OGRE also has a
compositing manager with a scripting language and full screen
postprocessing for effects such as High dynamic range rendering, Bloom (shader effect), saturation, brightness, blurring and noise. A
particle system with extensible rendering and customizable effectors and emitters.
The libraries also feature memory debugging and loading resources from archives.
There are content exporter tools available for most 3D modelers around including
3D Studio Max,
Maya (software),
Blender (software),
LightWave,
Milkshape,
Sketchup and more.
A full overview of the features provided by OGRE can be found here.
Google Summer of Code 2006
OGRE got 6 slots in Google Summer of Code 2006 to enhance the existing engine and add new features to it. These entries were:
- Tool for one-step solution for artists
- RmOgreExporter (v2), FxOgreExporter
- Geometry_instancing, Crowd Rendering
- Extending, Demo-ing, and Documenting the Shadow Mapping System
- Scene Management
- Billboard Clouds
Major version naming
The version branch names, Hastur for 0.15.x, Azathoth for 1.0.x, Dagon for 1.1.x and 1.2.x, Eihort for 1.3.x and 1.4.x,
Shoggoth for 1.5.x and 1.6.x, have been named after members of an ancient race of fearsome deities called the Great Old Ones in the
Cthulhu Mythos of
Lovecraft.
History
A brief history of OGRE, and its milestones:
Around
1999: Sinbad realises that his 'DIMClass' project, a project to make an easy to use object-oriented Direct3D library, has become so abstracted that it really doesn't need to be based on Direct3D any more. Begins planning a more ambitious library which could be API and platform independent.
February 25 2000 Sourceforge project registered, OGRE name coined. No development starts due to other commitments but much pondering occurs.February 2005: Ogre v1.0.0 "Azathoth" Final Released - resource system overhaul, hardware pixel buffers, HDR, CEGui, XSI exporterMarch 2005: Ogre is 'Project of the Month' on Sourceforge
November 4 2005:
Ankh (computer game) is released as the first commercial product using Ogre
May 7 2006: Ogre 1.2 "
Dagon" is officially released
March 25 2007 Ogre 1.4 "
Eihort" is officially released
Ogre ports and wrappers
There is a number of Ogre bindings to other languages and frameworks including PyOgre for Python (programming language), Ogre.rb for Ruby (programming language),
Ogre4j for Java (programming language) and for Microsoft .NET platform there are OgreDotNet and MOGRE.
Ogre being a rendering system is included in a number of
game engines:
- Axiom Engine
- Monster Engine
- Visual3D.NET
- WGE
- Yake
- NeoAxis Engine - a game engine and toolkit designed for the creation of game titles for all genres, as well as 3D Visualization and Virtual Reality projects.
- Shattered Ruby - a game development project aiming to create a Ruby-on-Rails style framework for games.
Projects using Ogre
Open source
Commercial
See also
External links
- OGRE Project Site
- Steve Streeting's Blog, Founder of OGRE 3D
- OGRE Wiki
- OGRE Forums
- Interview with Steve Streeting, project lead and original developer of OGRE
- Engine detail and reviews by users
- Emma3D, an internet-based media framework using OGRE
References
{{Infobox Software| name = OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine)| logo = | screenshot =| caption =| developer = The OGRE Team| latest_release_version = 1.4.5 (Eihort)| latest_release_date =
September 30, 2007| genre = [game engine| license =
GNU Lesser General Public License| website = www.ogre3d.org-->
OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D rendering engine (as opposed to a game engine) written in C++ designed to make it easier and intuitive for developers to produce applications utilising hardware-accelerated 3D computer graphics. The class library abstracts the details of using the underlying system libraries like
Direct3D and
OpenGL and provides an interface based on world objects and other high level classes.
The engine is free software, licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License and has a very active community. It has been used in some commercial games. It was Sourceforge's project of the month in March 2005.{{cite web|url=http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2005-03.php|title=SourceForge: Project of the Month|quote=March 2005 OGRE-->
1.0.0 "Azathoth" was released in February 2005, the current release in the 1.x.y series is 1.4.5 "Eihort" (September 2007).
General Information
As its name states, OGRE is "just" a rendering engine. As such, its main purpose is to provide a general solution for graphics rendering. Though it also comes with other facilities (vector and matrix classes, memory handling, etc.), they are considered supplemental. It is not an all-in-one solution in terms of game development or simulation as it doesn't provide audio or physics support, for instance.
Generally, this is thought of as the main drawback of OGRE, but it could also be seen as a feature of the engine. The choice of OGRE as a graphics engine allows developers the freedom to use whatever physics, input, audio and other libraries they want and allows the OGRE development team to focus on graphics rather than distribute their efforts amongst several systems. OGRE explicitly supports the OIS, SDL and CEGUI libraries, and includes the Cg toolkit.
Currently OGRE is published under a dual license (one being
LGPL, the other one called
OGRE Unrestricted License (OUL)), to make it possible to be chosen for console development as well, because most of the publishers reject using free/
open-source software software in that particular market.
Features
OGRE has an
object oriented design with a
plugin architecture that allows easy addition of features, thus making it highly modular.
OGRE is a
scene graph based engine, with support for a wide variety of scene managers, most notably
octree, Binary space partitioning and a
Paging Landscape scene manager, along with a beta-stage portal (computer graphics)-based scene manager under ongoing development.
OGRE is fully multi-platform, with OpenGL and
Direct3D support. It allows to render the same content on different platforms without the content creator having to take into consideration the different capabilities of each platform. This reduces the complexity of deploying a game on multiple systems. Currently pre-compiled binaries exist for Linux,
Mac OS X, and all major versions of Microsoft Windows.
OGRE also supports Vertex and Fragment programs along with custom shaders written in
GLSL,
HLSL, Cg programming language and
Assembly language.
The landscape scene manager has support for Progressive Level of detail (programming), which can be automatically or manually created.
The animation engine has full support for hardware weighted multiple bone skinning, which can be fixed across several poses for full pose mixing.
OGRE also has a
compositing manager with a
scripting language and full screen postprocessing for effects such as
High dynamic range rendering,
Bloom (shader effect), saturation, brightness, blurring and noise. A particle system with extensible rendering and customizable effectors and emitters.
The libraries also feature memory debugging and loading resources from archives.
There are content exporter tools available for most 3D modelers around including
3D Studio Max, Maya (software), Blender (software),
LightWave,
Milkshape, Sketchup and more.
A full overview of the features provided by OGRE can be found here.
Google Summer of Code 2006
OGRE got 6 slots in
Google Summer of Code 2006 to enhance the existing engine and add new features to it. These entries were:
- Tool for one-step solution for artists
- RmOgreExporter (v2), FxOgreExporter
- Geometry_instancing, Crowd Rendering
- Extending, Demo-ing, and Documenting the Shadow Mapping System
- Scene Management
- Billboard Clouds
Major version naming
The version branch names, Hastur for 0.15.x,
Azathoth for 1.0.x,
Dagon for 1.1.x and 1.2.x, Eihort for 1.3.x and 1.4.x,
Shoggoth for 1.5.x and 1.6.x, have been named after members of an ancient race of fearsome deities called the Great Old Ones in the
Cthulhu Mythos of Lovecraft.
History
A brief history of OGRE, and its milestones:
Around
1999: Sinbad realises that his 'DIMClass' project, a project to make an easy to use object-oriented Direct3D library, has become so abstracted that it really doesn't need to be based on Direct3D any more. Begins planning a more ambitious library which could be API and platform independent.
February 25 2000 Sourceforge project registered, OGRE name coined. No development starts due to other commitments but much pondering occurs.February 2005: Ogre v1.0.0 "Azathoth" Final Released - resource system overhaul, hardware pixel buffers, HDR, CEGui, XSI exporterMarch 2005: Ogre is 'Project of the Month' on Sourceforge
November 4 2005: Ankh (computer game) is released as the first commercial product using OgreMay 7 2006: Ogre 1.2 "Dagon" is officially released
March 25 2007 Ogre 1.4 "
Eihort" is officially released
Ogre ports and wrappers
There is a number of Ogre bindings to other languages and frameworks including PyOgre for
Python (programming language), Ogre.rb for
Ruby (programming language), Ogre4j for Java (programming language) and for Microsoft .NET platform there are OgreDotNet and MOGRE.
Ogre being a rendering system is included in a number of
game engines:
- Axiom Engine
- Monster Engine
- Visual3D.NET
- WGE
- Yake
- NeoAxis Engine - a game engine and toolkit designed for the creation of game titles for all genres, as well as 3D Visualization and Virtual Reality projects.
- Shattered Ruby - a game development project aiming to create a Ruby-on-Rails style framework for games.
Projects using Ogre
Open source
Commercial
See also
- CEGUI The unofficial Graphical user interface Widget toolkit for OGRE.
- 3D computer graphics software
External links
- OGRE Project Site
- Steve Streeting's Blog, Founder of OGRE 3D
- OGRE Wiki
- OGRE Forums
- Interview with Steve Streeting, project lead and original developer of OGRE
- Engine detail and reviews by users
- Emma3D, an internet-based media framework using OGRE
References
