Please note, I am not an Ogre developer. Although I used to provide a lot of community assistance on the IRC channel.
Erostorm wrote: ↑Sun Mar 29, 2020 6:20 am
Ogre is dying cause of many reasons.
from what i've seen in 13 years of failure since 2007, the main reason is it goes in every direction, no clear goals, no roadmap of any kind, and lately project is splitted in many versions, total cancer.
Yesh, what a lamo.
First off, failure since 2007? It's been a long time since I updated this
list, but 64 games released on Steam by Q3-2017 (before Valve opened the flood gates) is pretty damn impressive. That's roughly a half percent market share. In 2014, Ogre had a full 1% market share on Steam. And that's not including games that use all or parts Ogre, that we couldn't find.
So Ogre is doing quite well in the gaming industry for what it is. And gaming isn't even Ogre's focus.
second reason it is no more user friendly, long time ago you had an official SDK, installer, you just had to install and then start coding your project and it worked.
Folks looking for "user friendly" game engines left Ogre in 2012 for Unity, UE4, and these days Godot. If you're using Ogre3D to make games after 2012, you need a very damn good reason to be rolling your own engine.
At that time it had the majority of modern shading techncis such as normal mapping, terrain, skeletal animation, etc.
Ogre had a lot more developers looking to make game engines in those days. Game making devs have all long since left to work on premade engines. Even Sinbad.
Then at some time they totally stopped bringing latest technologies to the renderer and it was getting so old, someone came and started that ogre 2.0 project, its 2020 im still waiting for a 2.0 sdk, it seems the guy jumped to 2.1, 2.2, the sky is the limit, if you cant compile, its your own fault, not his.
If you can't compile Ogre, you shouldn't be using Ogre. That's always been the case. It's not a drag and drop game engine. It's a rendering library for those of us that don't want to write our own rendering stacks. If you want something easy for game making, you use a full blown game making engine. I've been on Ogre since 1.3, and I think as of 1.11 with C-make, it's never been easier. But that might be me.
compare this failed project with lets say Blender.org
Blender is a failed commerical product that found a FOSS niche against 3 extremely expensive products owned by the same company. The only reasons Blender did well, is because 1) hobbiest don't want to spend $2000-$3000 on 3d modeling software. 2) It's freaken hard to write a full blown 3d modeling stack. 3) And very little competition. Throw in a #4 after the hobbyist became semi-professionals, businesses found a way to cut a few grand per head... Had blender actually been a good product for most its life, I imagine Autodesk would have been in a world of hurt.
Ogre had lots of competition from all angles. FOSS competition, Game engine specific competition, Industrial competition. And then the big players, AAA high dollar engines that went with a freemium model. Imagine if 3dsm and maya were 100% free. Blender wouldn't be anywhere near what it is today.
So your comparison is bad.
You will understand how a great open source project failed miserably.
Considering Ogre is 20 years old, still actively developed, and still actively used in a vast array of products, I'm not sure how it's a failure. Is Ogre in a decline from it's peak? Sure. But it's no where near the bottom or anywhere close to a failure.
Developpers not interested in modern rendering technics, not interested in modern gaming, etc, etc.
Ogre is not a game engine. It has NOTHING to do with games. You can make a game with it, yes, but it doesn't matter if the developers are interested in games. They writing a rendering engine.
As for modern techniques, I don't keep up with development too closely. But Ogre2.x is fairly modern. Ogre 1.x is for those of us with legacy products. I do not want modern techniques in Ogre 1.x, because it would break the half million dollars worth of software I have wrote for my product. I just want incremental improvements and bug fixes. Use Ogre 2.x for modern techniques.
Look unigine which was also a renderer, they migrated to game engine recently, even providing SDK trial to anyone.
There are also so many other renderers that popped up on github these last years, even web based projects are light years ahead of ogre.
https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_cloth
I'm not seeing anything you can't do in Ogre. Although I will agree Ogre needs some easier ways to implement eye candy shaders.
I keep coming on this forum from time to time over the years to see if the devs wake up and start working on that sdk seriously, but it's always a deception.
When you openup any sample browser, any version, half the demos dont work, some work on opengl, some on directx, good luck to find what is what.
If that's a problem for you, you're more than welcome to contribute.
like somebody is going to play games on linux, its 2020 and everyone still uses windows for gaming.
Ogre is not a game engine. Stop referring to pointless gaming.
That being said, other than with my own product, I do not use Windows for gaming. Hell, I don't even use Windows on the internet. It's a stupid security risk to do so.
They were so quick in ogre to start coding ios compatibility, in every tutorial, ios here, ios there.
Im still trying to find a real video game on apple store, haha, one that doesnt have a hundred ads forced on your screen per minute.
The development team goes in the direction that they need, or are paid to go. Want them to go a different direction? Contribute or pay them.
So that ogre project is not going anywhere.
Ogre 1.x is going quite well if you ask me. I pass it along updates every now and then to my 30,000+ users. And they're happy. Eventually I plan to pass along some of those profits back to Ogre.
However, it might not be going where you want it to go.
I was hoping this patreon would make things evolve positively, but it seems that the guy doesnt understand the concept of patreon, if you dont have anything to give in return, no one is going to subscribe to the patreon, its not a donation system like paypal.
You don't have to give away anything for a patreon. I know lots of people who use it simply as a pay me so I can keep working on this stuff system.
I do however think you don't know how not to be a jackass. But I digress.