What happend with Ogre?

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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by Kojack »

We did a reverse lookup of the ip, it appeared that there were sites that sounded like porn on the host.
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by al2950 »

lonewolff wrote:Unfortunately as Kojack pointed out, every one of those links are blocked in Australia.

Any alternate links?
I can't believe the bitbucket link is blocked!?
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by Kojack »

I don't think he meant the bitbucket one, just the three yosoy ones.
(Bitbucket works fine for me. It would be funny if it was blocked here, since Atlassian is an australian company)
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by spookyboo »

It makes me sad to think that Ogre plays a less important role in 3D development, but the problem is (and always was), that it is a bit 'by programmers for programmers'. Sometimes this is good, because you want to attract a certain audience, but on the other side, a bit of public relation is also needed to persuade decision makers to choose for Ogre. A real problem is that Ogre lacks in the tool and art department. Yes, there are a few good applications/games that are based on Ogre, but overall it still takes a lot of effort to develop the application you want.
The launch of Ogre 2.0 would benefit strongly with a killer demo that has professional art/models and shows some killer features (i.e. high framerate). On the tooling side, I think this remains a problem in the future. I've seen a lot of tools, but none of them reaches a very high level of professionalism (including particle universe, which basically is a bit 'crappy'). Maybe its a good idea to develop some building block with which it is possible to develop the tools. A kind of IDE builder, wich generates a basic IDE with 3D elements (Ogre windows, Gizmo's, node editor classes, ...). I even consider to develop something myself.
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by al2950 »

lonewolff wrote:Unfortunately as Kojack pointed out, every one of those links are blocked in Australia.

Any alternate links? Or can the contents be posted on a thread here on the forums?

[edit]
I wasn't even aware we had Internet censoring here in Australia. Go figure.
Here is a rar of a couple of dark_sylink's blogs that might interest you (I hope he does not mind :oops: ). I have left out all performance stuff, even though one of the main focuses of Ogre 2.0 is performance, and yes it is faster, MUCH faster :). Also the other major part is the new compositor system, but as I said before you should look at the porting notes from the bitbucket repo for that. There is also a load of other stuff which what has been improved/fixed, eg texture shadow mapping.
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by dark_sylinc »

Fantastic thread!!!

Yes, the rise and ease of access of Unity and UE4 is definitely taken users away from us. We're, by definition, a graphics engine. While the former two are game engines.
There's a lot of people who prefer working with a big nice editor, than having to glue sound, physics, game loop and Ogre together. Furthermore, Sinbad's decision of not focusing on tools (that has usually been left for others to do) is something that I never liked, and now is showing.
On the simulation/scientific niches we're still strong, thanks to being a free graphics engine rather than a game engine.

The UE4 business model is very new. As an accountant I can predict quite a bunch of disappointments (i.e. reconsider) after the 5% on gross revenue kicks in. People often underestimate the toll it takes a small percentage on gross revenue (net revenue is an entirely different thing!).
However, there is still a lot of users (newbies, students) who will never release or earn any money from it, and they'll be more attracted to UE4 than Ogre.

Well, enough on opinions.
First, we're not dead. Ogre 2.x is still in very active development. What doesn't help is that lot of that development is kept private as I explained in more detail in another post.
To make things worse, I had to move my website to another hosting and it turns out this new host is being blocked by several ISPs. That gives a bad impression of dead links when the site is actually up.

Enough excuses, Ogre 2.x is comming along nicely. The HLMS (High Level Material System) is doing great wonders. Setting up good looking materials is extremely easy and there are a lot of features to play with (up to 4 detail maps, up to 4 detail normal maps, 1 diffuse map, 1 normal map, 1 specular map, 1 roughness map, a blend weight map to tell the Hlms how to blend the 4 detail maps; and of course, environmental reflections).
Basically a similar feature set that Unity 5 has been announcing (TBH I was told about it then given a youtube link long after I've implemented those features in Ogre).
A total of up to 14 textures. And the Hlms will generate efficient shader for each permutation automatically.
That includes hardware skeletal animation and shadow mapping automatically being handled for you.
This helps you a lot to focus on what really matters, rather than having to deal with shaders, material schemes, shadow map passes, and skeletal animation support.

We've redesigned the RenderQueue. I'm close to finishing the AZDO pipeline (minimum required hardware is DX10/GL3). Things are going to get blazing fast pretty soon. There's barely any API overhead.
Note that at the time of writing, Azdo only works on the GL3+ render system. D3D11 & GLES2 haven't been touched yet.
We now render using a command buffer which has improved performance in unexpected ways:

It's sooooooo much easier to write efficient code with it.
First I wrote it because we needed a way to update all the buffers and issue draw calls in one iteration loop. But you can't call glDraw while a buffer is still mapped (unless it's persistent, which is GL4 only).
So the Cmd Buffer was just a way to defer the calls until the end, when I could unmap the buffers safely.
But then opportunities came up; If I needed to draw the same mesh again, I just grabbed the cmd buffer's last entry and increment the instanceCount variable.
For tbuffers (texture buffers), I need to know how many bytes I will bind to the shader. I was going to try to guess using a very big number. But w/ a cmd buffer, I will know this information after I'm done, and then modify the cmd buffer's entry so that the bind range is correct.
In other words, optimize the commands with information that is known afterwards.

I can't say I'm a master mind. I didn't want to implement the Cmd Buffer, just needed it to support the bloody GL3 hardware, and then it turns out it was awesome. The opportunities just started to appear all over the place.
And when I execute the commands, it's a hot for loop that can just issues glDraw calls one after another.
There are other very neat tricks/hacks we do with the Cmd Buffer that is subject for an entire blog post.

I'm crossing my fingers that these optimizations make a difference in GLES2 as well. I'm aiming for Ogre to be the fastest engine on Desktop and Mobile. We may not be able to compete in terms of tools and out of the box physics/sound/logic.
But Unity isn't exactly the fastest engine on Mobile. I don't know about UE4. Squeezing good performance out of Android and iOS is hard.
Also on Desktop, we should be really fast too. I'm aiming for the fastest.
Meanwhile the Hlms materials provide much better visual quality with much easier setup than previous versions.
Of course, competitors don't stay asleep. I've seen Aras (Unity) tweeting that they have a Command Buffer coming as well. I don't know how they've implemented it, but if it remotely resembles ours (and I'm guessing the similarities could be striking as there aren't many ways of writing one) then our tricks would be available for them as well.

Just to make it clear, there are around 99 commits that haven't been integrated to the main public branch. That is a lot of code. We're not dead.
I hope you understand the reasons..

Cheers!
**goes back to my cave**
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by dark_sylinc »

spookyboo wrote:I've seen a lot of tools, but none of them reaches a very high level of professionalism (including particle universe, which basically is a bit 'crappy').
You would be surprised how many artists I've heard that like PU's flexibility, that, quoting "surpasses the features and what I can do with some very, very expensive particle system packages [for the movie industry]"
They like the programmability of the scripts, but they don't like the script interface (i.e. text). All these comments came from Sr. artists that have tried your product. Jr. artists prefer easy stuff, not flexibility.

As a games programmer, PU had a serious performance issue though.
al2950 wrote:Here is a rar of a couple of dark_sylink's blogs that might interest you (I hope he does not mind :oops: )
Thanks! I wanted to do the same. I dislike the less page views (ad revenue! it's very low anyway...), but I believe knowledge should be accesible for everyone :)
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by Herb »

I do think people underestimate the value of flexibility and understanding what's going on under the hood with game / simulation development. I've tried Unreal / Unity / NeoAxis, and there comes a point where some way they've built it breaks what you want to do. If your game doesn't fit into the mold / template they have, it's either really hard to change it or you don't have access to the code to change it (or it's not documented / no support to do it). This can be especially true with performance issues.

That being said, there are less people (sadly) in the world who are understanding native code as already mentioned. I'll put my two thoughts in for this (some have already mentioned or alluded to these already).

1. Supported cross-platform port of Ogre3D to C#. I was thinking about experimenting with SWIG for this, as I've done this for a few small libraries in the past. Maybe it could be a way to do it easier...and it would work cross platform.

2. Adding to the demos with a few project templates for basic game types. This would provide a good starting point to new Ogre programmers. Basic shell for a RPG or FPS or something. Many of the code snippets to do this are already sprinkled around in the forums and wiki.

Echoing earlier comments, Ogre 2.0 with it's performance and support increase for new rendering systems, sounds like a good time to look at these ideas. :)
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by frostbyte »

iv'e heard somthing about OGRE getting a nightly build system...sounds great....is it internal OGRE team, or open for public?
Sinbad's decision of not focusing on tools (that has usually been left for others to do) is something that I never liked, and now is showing.
yes it does..., how ever i think Sinbads vision was building an eco system in which ogre will be a fundmental base for other more user oriented software....
this vision was slighly missed...eco system should be something taken care of at basic( team ) levels...
Unity would be=nothing without its eco system( assets store ) and no marketing or PR could help them without it...
i can't realy imagine ogre-team building a professional tool-set that will comapre with unreal/unity
as i see it, giving focus to tools means giving focus to the ECO-SYSTEM which can include many things...couple of ideas off my mind...
having a common official repository( github? ) for plugins/addons
having a nighly build system for ogre 3rd party plugins/addons will defently make OGRE more accessable for Newbi's and Pros alike...
maybe a package manager?
anyway the obsolete ADDONS forum should be updated with new/relevant plugins/addons as i'm guessing that for someone new to OGRE - it looks like abandoned...

perhaps losing some of OGRE flexibilty in favour of tightning the integration with plugins/addons on a more unified base will help the eco-system thrive... ( see "DotScene" adoptation debate as an example )

OGRE should be more friendly to Newbies...
to make OGRE accessible OGRE should be somthing that u just download and start playing with...without messing with compilers/build systems/wiki/forum etc...
maybe adding tutorial framework and user project builder/wizard to the OFFICIAL REP can be a nice first step...( SampleBrowser is fairly complex for Newbies and serves more as a showcase... )

hearing about 2.0 progress makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside... :wink:
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by lonewolff »

Awesome info. 8)

Is there a downloadable alpha/beta of Ogre 2.0 yet?
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by Thyrion »

al2950 wrote:
lonewolff wrote:Where does one get there hands on Ogre 2?

Is there a page that shows how it works and how it differs from 1.x?
Various places, although reading the whole of dark_sylinc blog gives the majority, but I would specifically read;
http://yosoygames.com.ar/wp/2013/07/ogr ... 3x-faster/
http://yosoygames.com.ar/wp/2014/05/a-g ... 2-0-final/
http://yosoygames.com.ar/wp/2014/08/ogre-2-0-final-faq/

I would also give the porting manual a read, specifically the part about the compositor;
https://bitbucket.org/sinbad/ogre/src/6 ... dt?at=v2-0
Thyrion wrote:. porting the ogre code to 2.0 seems like a pita ...
Its not as bad as you might think. I guess it really depends how you designed your engine. I ported my engine within a day, albeit with some bugs! However that does not include porting the 3rd party libs I use.
you dont want to open source your engine, or? :P
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by Thyrion »

lonewolff wrote:Awesome info. 8)

Is there a downloadable alpha/beta of Ogre 2.0 yet?
https://bitbucket.org/sinbad/ogre/src/6 ... e/?at=v2-0 ?
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by areay »

I had another though about the waning attraction of Ogre to newbies.

Seems that many people who want to make games are doing so, not for the love of it, but instead for the lucrative wealth that making games can provide. They want to make an "Angry Flappy Bird Saga" clone, and they don't care how they do it. They don't want to learn the art of making games, they want to get rich quick by cloning whatever the last big hit was and then dumping it into Steam/AppleStore/whatever within a few weeks of something *going viral*. You don't use Ogre for making a game quickly, we all know this.
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by gameengineer »

This a great thread packed with good information. After being away for a couple years it's good to see Ogre development is still alive and active with v2.0 showing some really cool new features.
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by lonewolff »

areay wrote:I had another though about the waning attraction of Ogre to newbies.

Seems that many people who want to make games are doing so, not for the love of it, but instead for the lucrative wealth that making games can provide. They want to make an "Angry Flappy Bird Saga" clone, and they don't care how they do it. They don't want to learn the art of making games, they want to get rich quick by cloning whatever the last big hit was and then dumping it into Steam/AppleStore/whatever within a few weeks of something *going viral*. You don't use Ogre for making a game quickly, we all know this.
That is probably a good thing.

I'd personally dislike to have those types in this forum. Forums with this sort of crowd are very self centred and breed the nastiest of trolls.

Since joining this forum, I can't say that I have ever seen troll-ish behaviour or 'blowouts'. In fact, I hadn't been part of another forum (except for gamedev.net) until only a year or so ago. It was an eye opener. The amount of abuse you get from trolls on these 'pre-fabricated' game engine sites is ridiculous. You show something cool that you have created and are proud of and you get abused to all hell as everyone else 'knows better'.

The Ogre community is probably the friendliest and most helpful, that I have ever been a part of.

So yeah, 'happy flappy candy bird' creators can stay over in the GameMaker, Unity, etc.. forums in my opinion. :lol:
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by lonewolff »

Thyrion wrote:
lonewolff wrote:Awesome info. 8)

Is there a downloadable alpha/beta of Ogre 2.0 yet?
https://bitbucket.org/sinbad/ogre/src/6 ... e/?at=v2-0 ?
Hmmm, good old bitbucket, drops the connection everytime.

Last attempt got me 176 MB of the way there. Now it is starting from scratch again. :(
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by spacegaier »

lonewolff wrote:Last attempt got me 176 MB of the way there. Now it is starting from scratch again. :(
You need only 136MB if you don't go for the whole repository, but just the latest 2.0 branch: https://bitbucket.org/sinbad/ogre/get/v2-0.tar.bz2
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by lonewolff »

Nice, thanks for the link :)
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by Zonder »

Herb wrote: 1. Supported cross-platform port of Ogre3D to C#. I was thinking about experimenting with SWIG for this, as I've done this for a few small libraries in the past. Maybe it could be a way to do it easier...and it would work cross platform.
The updated CppSharp project probably needs another check over before using swig as it gives a more correct binding. As i recollect templates were the problem last time it was checked.

https://github.com/mono/CppSharp
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by Kojack »

Matias has fixed the site issue, you should be able to get on his page now without being blocked.
lonewolff wrote:Since joining this forum, I can't say that I have ever seen troll-ish behaviour or 'blowouts'. In fact, I hadn't been part of another forum (except for gamedev.net) until only a year or so ago. It was an eye opener. The amount of abuse you get from trolls on these 'pre-fabricated' game engine sites is ridiculous. You show something cool that you have created and are proud of and you get abused to all hell as everyone else 'knows better'.
Oh we've had some, but it's mostly gone now. We've only had to ban people for behaviour a few times over the last 8+ years that I've had insider knowledge of it.

I once visited a forum devoted to getting airsoft legalised in australia (our laws are a bit stupid, they consider a little airsoft pellet gun as the same category as a rifle). The admin was a complete control freak. He screamed abuse at and banned a member for saying something absolutely unthinkable: not all police/military boots have metal toe caps.
Wait a sec... there ARE police/military boots that don't have metal in them!

The Sims forums were pretty horrible too. I don't know from personal experience, but my sister went there a lot (big Sims fan). So many double standards, cronyism, corruption, etc. Oh, and crazy people requesting mods that enabled rape, suicide, underage sex, abortions, etc. Why? "Because it happens in real life, so you must let us do it in the game too, so we can tell the story we want" (paraphrased).

But enough craziness. Back to Ogre...

Yay, I got Ogre 2.0 running in my new Kage engine (replacing the old QGF engine I use with my students). I can resume Oculus integration.
Oh, and the Ogre Asset Overhaul project, but that's a story for another time. :)
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by insider »

+1 Jack

Ogre forums is without doubt the most friendliest forum around and I ll be here as long as it takes. :D
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by Thyrion »

i dont realy understand why u want to port ogre to C#.

what GUI do u want to use? WPF,Winforms(OK, Mono not windows only) are windows only. I hope winforms dies! :)

I thought using C# for scripting is slower than LUAJit or something like that ...
You have to maintain an additional huge sourcecode, if u want to be up to date with current ogre3d c++.
I could see it with mogre, its just a big mess.
Entity Framework is a huge lifesaver in bigger database apps, but i wouldnt us it, if i need good performance.

I am just using .Net (WPF) for applications, Editor and as interface to c++, i use Datafiles.
So i have the full c++ Process(Ogre) power in Editor and if i would shipp the Game or what ever, too.

if i want to write a game in C# i wouldnt use Ogre.

Hmm.... After thinking more about it ...

Now as c# goes native & platform independent with HTML5 GUI i can see a benefit from that .... :/

never ending story ....

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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by Klaim »

Just to add on what I initially said, that point is not often pointed (except in recent new user posts): until Ogre is easier to setup at first (after passing the required C++ knowledge to understand how to link with it), I believe a lot of potential users are just stunned and decide to not even ask for help and just go with something simpler.

I think it might be fixable but I think my understanding of the internal is not good enough to know how it would be fixed efficiently. It looks like there are a bit less steps with Ogre 2 but I'm not totally sure (didn't integrate it in my projects yet).
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by Herb »

@Zonder - I hadn't seen that project (CppSharp) before....interesting... Yes, STL and templates are always the hard part with the bindings. The readme on CppSharp says:
Work-in-progress support for STL (C++/CLI only)
So, sounds like they need more work for cross-platform. But, I'm not saying SWIG is there either. Sounds like from my initial look at PyOgre (which at one point used SWIG), they had to tweak SWIG interface classes to all the Ogre classes one by one dealing with oddities.

@Thyrion - I think the C# thing is that more people know it and can program in more confidently than C++. I'm not saying it's better, it's not, but I'm finding that many colleges are teaching C++ less and less these days. My point was if a working wrapper was up and working with the latest branches, it might attract more people to Ogre for the reasons I just mentioned.
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Re: What happend with Ogre?

Post by Thyrion »

Herb wrote: @Thyrion - I think the C# thing is that more people know it and can program in more confidently than C++. I'm not saying it's better, it's not, but I'm finding that many colleges are teaching C++ less and less these days. My point was if a working wrapper was up and working with the latest branches, it might attract more people to Ogre for the reasons I just mentioned.
I think good looking pictures what can be done, shiny new features and good FPS attract more than anything else ... :)
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