Been a while...

[mkultra333]

First time I've been back here in almost 4 years. I haven't done any Ogre coding since 2019, but the Unity "fee per install" pricing change has me looking at my old Necro Mutex engine and thinking "Hmm, maybe coding your own game engine instead of using Unity wasn't the massive mistake I thought it was."

[DolfHoll]

It's great to hear you're considering going back to work on your old Necro Mutex game engine after 4 years away from Ogre coding. But now, with Unity's new monetization approach, you're realizing the value in controlling your own engine technology. There's something to be said for that independence and customizability, even if it requires a lot more upfront investment. If you still believe in the potential of Necro Mutex and are excited to develop it further, it could be a worthwhile endeavor.

[sercero]

But you said Unreal in your rant so...

[rpgplayerrobin]

I think the thing to take away from all this is that all commercial game engines out there are now unsafe.
They are owned by companies that only make them to get money, and if their policies can change this much in the industry of hundreds of game companies, maybe commercial game engines are a liability for game developers.

[dark_sylinc]

Personally I believe one should prefer FOSS engines because you are in full control of everything; and you definitely don't want to have the core foundation of your business to depend on someone else entirely.

This is common sense in other industries (aerospace, robotics, cars, simulation, finance, pharmacy, oil drilling, server infrastructure, etc) except for Government contracts.
Even Valve shied away from Windows once they realized how vulnerable their position was and went all in into Linux (Mesa + Proton). The Steam Deck is their first major success after almost a decade of investing into replacing Windows.

Having a few proprietary wheel cogs along the way is ok (e.g. using Autodesk vs Blender, Adobe vs GIMP) because they don't compromise the very core. If the company one day becomes unreasonable, you can replace them at a cost (ultimately it is always a cost vs benefit analysis; owning everything also means you have to allocate resources to maintaining it; and if the proprietary alternative is much superior then you pay for the license and choose to believe they'll stay reasonable until you're done).

Unreal Engine is a bit odd because legally Epic could one day screw you (e.g. they could raise the % to 50% of the revenue if they wished so); but unlike Unity, Epic decided to hand off the source code. That doesn't make it FOSS; but it gives you better control; i.e. you can be certain that if Epic tomorrows wants to charge a fee per install, they can't technically do that simply because you can compile your own version of UE stripped of analytics.

Of course my bias is towards FOSS engines (e.g. OgreNext*, Godot); but if I try to stay impartial, practical and open minded; UE is not in the same situation as Unity; when you put it in a SWOT analysis**.
When you put Unity in the Threats axis, it is full of them. That is a no-go for any well trained manager; and that's the reason I, as an advisor, always told my clients to prefer UE over Unity (when I couldn't persuade them of using FOSS or it wasn't a good fit for them).

*OgreNext is a graphics engine, not a game engine.

** The wikipedia article isn't very good at doing an ELI5. The SWOT analysis is very simple: You create 4 lists.
Strenghts & Weaknesses are things innate to you & your company. They are things you can fix or take advantage of.
Opportunities & Threats are things external to you and there's not much you can do about them. You can at best mitigate the risks and try to take opportunities. There are rare exceptions (e.g. you can buy off your competitors if you have too much money), but normally Threats are really bad. And Opportunities are available to you but also to anyone else.

[syedhs]

I think the thing to take away from all this is that all commercial game engines out there are now unsafe.

Every game engine out there is unsafe.. even FOSS has its own short coming but it is question of pros and cons and what is your weightage against them. Some of us value FOSS very much which is okay so they will stick to FOSS no matter what. For me, I choose UE4 because source code is all there for you to see, build, study. I can also see that the owner (Tim Sweeny - who used to be hardcode programmers) and I still see his immense love in tech as evidenced in tech acquisition, generosity (metahuman, quixel, monthly free marketplace items). It is in dark contrast with the other CEO who only loves money making far more than product development.

p/s: Welcome back everyone..

[mkultra333]

But you said Unreal in your rant so...

I don't know which rant you mean. It could be any number of them. Also, I have ended up using Unreal. However I'm now looking at how I can utilize my ogre code in Unreal projects. Gonna try some experiments, maybe it'll work and maybe it won't.

Personally I believe one should prefer FOSS engines because you are in full control of everything; and you definitely don't want to have the core foundation of your business to depend on someone else entirely.

In an ideal world, yes.

[sercero]

But you said Unreal in your rant so...

I don't know which rant you mean. It could be any number of them. Also, I have ended up using Unreal. However I'm now looking at how I can utilize my ogre code in Unreal projects. Gonna try some experiments, maybe it'll work and maybe it won't.

Here: viewtopic.php?p=545511#p545511

But it seems you said Unreal or Unity, so my mistake.

[mkultra333]

Three lines is a rant? Give me a break, I've done way worse on many occasions (though probably not here).

[c6burns]

Hello beautiful people of the Ogre Forums. I have genuinely missed you all, and I've missed your phpBB setup and the 'Preview' button ... a required feature for people like me, unavailable to slack or discord

Some of you may remember me! I just wanted to say to you all, lurkers, users, developers, contributors, and team members alike ... thank you from the bottom of my heart. If there existed such a button, that took a kudos I have earned and gave it to someone who once helped me here on these forums ... I would push that button until I had 0 left. Then I would provide additional support and contributions until I could push the button again. In fact, let's just try that - provided I find some free time - even though there is no such button. But if one of you gets clever with PHP ... then so be it

First time I've been back here in almost 4 years. I haven't done any Ogre coding since 2019, but the Unity "fee per install" pricing change has me looking at my old Necro Mutex engine and thinking "Hmm, maybe coding your own game engine instead of using Unity wasn't the massive mistake I thought it was."

Hey partner, I remember you! I remember you being awesome and offering genuine advice and technical knowledge and opinion. Thanks mkultra!

Personally I believe one should prefer FOSS engines because ...

Wow, it's dark_sylinc! I agree with the above statement, and am learning O3DE and rejoining Ogre I remember you fondly, man! Who knew that accountants could be seriously badass engineers that will forever dwarf my technical knowledge in engine development. Then again, I was trained as an economist. So I don't know why your background ever surprised me!

I always looked up to you, but never said. You took over technical direction after Steve, and not by 'taking over', but by sharing your knowledge, valued opinion, and making contributions. That's serious leadership in my books. Thanks for just being yourself, but doing it publicly so that people you barely knew could learn your genuine and powerful leadership style.

... CEO who only loves money making far more than product development.

p/s: Welcome back everyone..

Hey syedhs, I remember you as well! I could not agree more with you here. I've long felt Epic is run by 'one of us' ... a nerd who loves his techy toys While Unity has long been run by 'business executives' who have on many occasions shown us:

• they do not have a clear technical vision for the product

• they prefer adding product accessories - which are non-free - over enhancing the product

• they have established a pattern of focus on USPs or 'bell and whistle' features over addressing core concerns in the product

• they have consistently underpaid their software developers and focused on reducing costs over hiring industry expertise

• over time the above factors have led to an inferior product serving a mobile niche and the remainder of a capitalized market

Brutal, but accurate?

There are so many more of you I can't wait to hunt down and ramble to

I'm back as well, having remembered my password after all this time. I was bummed to find a _six year old support thread where I was helping someone and could have resolved their issue if I hadn't merely gone AWOL. I walked away from this community because I had moved on to commercial middleware, because I had completed a vertical slice using a ground-up engine / editor / tools and then my game. I did it because I wanted to really know if video games were simply real-time distributed simulation systems. I don't think I need to tell you all the truth that I discovered.

For the last 3 solid years I've been a TD and shipped a number of titles as a manager and an engineer. I've used a number of commercial games backends - creating a few myself - and provided hardcore platform support on each of the platforms. I led teams of executives and engineers through planning and execution of first-party certification, which I feel has become a strength.

And I've had the time of my life doing it! I've never once encountered an issue that I couldn't diagnose and then solve. OK that's an outright lie. On an EA title, I remember we had several complex issues with generated shaders in Unreal 5.1 and while I understand exactly what the shader programmer and material artists had done to cause the situation - which someone should most certainly have known not to do - I had never debugged such a thing on PS5. It turned out not to be too bad, since as you can imagine the PS5 is a commercial development platform that provides superlative documentation and developer support. Since I'm used to 'broken OSS toilets' you have to eagerly jam your hand into to find the malfunctioning components, I don't recall needing to escalate an issue beyond documentation - save to inform such a commercial vendor of product defects

The fact was that in AAA project there are a gargantuan number of assets, and it's trivial for some to become entangled. Thus generating the runtime files / formats of the assets can take a while ... as in ... several days. Unreal calls this 'cooking' and there are mechanisms to group assets into 'chunks' and manage them as resources, just that had not occurred during pre-production and now iterating towards a resolution had become nearly impossible Thankfully there was a rendering engineer with deep PS5 experience - which there sometimes isn't by the way - and I was simply assisting him; mainly by providing a safe rubber ducky service. And wouldn't you know it? He was faster at creating the development environment allowing full shader debug. I had managed that, but was multitasking (aka doing several things at poorer quality) so I just left it to him. I'm certain I would have solved it, but that's not quite how production schedules are allowed to work!

If the above seems boastful, or even arrogant, I can explain. I've long been a master of linux and all things GNU. As a tiny nerd of 15, I obtained a copy of djgpp 1.05, a compiler which existed because Richard Stallman had publicly stated that porting 32bit gcc / binutils to 16bit MS-DOS was not possible. Some people take that sort of statement as a challenge! I recently emailed the creator of djgpp, to thank him for being a giant whose shoulders I stood upon. And to express my deepest thanks for offering to the world - for nothing at all in return - his good works of such quality that I myself had never investigated how they work with specificity. And then I made a substantial donation to the FSF.

You see, I've always known completely free tools from which I create my works by my hand. Completely free to everyone. And that's why I chose Ogre when I did. Yes, my core gameplay feature was not possible in existing commercial middleware, having performed an extensive evaluation of literally every option. But I'm sure I could have developed the feature within such middleware. But ... that's never exactly been my style? When I saw that I couldn't use money for licensing to get what I needed, that was pretty normal to me! I must have evaluated every OSS project in gaming And then I settled on Ogre, SDL2, bullet, cricket (woah it went zlib), EOE where I apparently helped fix skeletal + morph? rad!, and of course Ogitor based editor and random Qt5 / CLI tools of my own creation.

Finally, I supported my gameplay feature through decoupling render and physics choosing 'message passing' over 'shared memory' using SPSC queues. When the player would hit large stacks of physics objects or destructibles - assembled w/ custom tools in Max 2010 and pipelining with EOE as a base - the render and audio subsystems would reduce playback speed creating a slow motion effect. But the physical world would continue to step at maximum pace - though slowly - due to large amount of awakened physicalized entities. The descructibles were designed to blow apart - with 'islands' being resolved using synchronous parallelism - and then fall asleep as the physical forces of each entity subside. By then, the render and audio subsystems have caught up, and I've pulled something of a magic trick The runtime had performed significantly more physics that was possible in real-time, yet the illusion of a fluid experience was consistently maintained. That's what I was up to around here for those years you all met me! Sorry for leaving after I'd completed it successfully ... that was selfish at best.

What I'm really trying to say, in my particular and rambling style, is thank you ... again. If I've shown pride or arrogance in my statements, I genuinely apologize for causing insult. I am proud of what I've accomplished because of this community, but that's not my intent. I'm expressing my eternal gratitude for finding a safe space to learn and grow and acquire every single scrap of knowledge I would need to master the various aspects of game development. Here in this community, I found genuine friendship, leaders to follow and role model, and follow developers who either taught me outright - or improved my understanding of - every tool and process I use today.

Thankfully I've never pretended to be a rendering engineer, even after a decade of using Ogre

[sercero]

Well, I'm glad you found your password ... welcome back.

If you've been around for some time browsing the forums, the black and white Daft Punk shooting avatar will show up quite a few times

[Kojack]

I really need to get back into Ogre stuff. My college moved all game dev subjects to C# / Unity only, except for one subject that was C++ with 2D games, so for years I've been mainly using SFML (yay) and Unity (boo). Although that subject got scrapped too, so I just stick with 2D because I find sprite engines more fun to quickly hack around in.

Just a couple of weeks ago I was trying to fix render issues in a student Unity game (involving depth tests and writes, render queues, etc). Urgh. I was sitting there thinking "if this was a classic Ogre material file this would be easy!"

Hehe, I was just thinking about Necro Mutex the other day.

[ekt]

hello people!
in ancient times I wrote a game engine in C# which then used ogre via interop (when unity was only for mac) - I didn't become rich and famous but I got a lot of fun from it and I am infinitely grateful to sinbad
then I got tired of writing the engine (I wanted to write video games!) and so I switched to using already existing engines. I'll get to the point:

• I have two old ogre-based projects that I would like to refresh and that I'm considering dedicating some time to.
• if I had to update the engine, which version should I use to make as little effort as possible?
• for physics I used a heavily modified version of OgreOde. does it still exist?
• at the time I was using 3dstudio max and OgreMax. Is there a pseudo-painless way with which I can migrate to Blender?

btw: it was strange and a little bittersweet, seeing the unchanged avatars of certain characters that I used to read here in the past. I'm sorry not to see the two crossed sabers

[rpgplayerrobin]

I have two old ogre-based projects that I would like to refresh and that I'm considering dedicating some time to.
if I had to update the engine, which version should I use to make as little effort as possible?

It all depends on how your project works. Is it using only fixed-function (ie. not any shaders), or did you write your own shaders for it?
If your projects are very old, it will be very hard to port them to Ogre Next. The newer versions of Ogre v1 (like 14.1) is probably the best alternative.

If you wrote your own shaders, you can keep the same kind of system you already have. But if your graphics look outdated you can use the built in RTSS to help you generate shaders (https://ogrecave.github.io/ogre/api/latest/rtss.html).

for physics I used a heavily modified version of OgreOde. does it still exist?

No idea. But if you are used to it and it works for you, keep the same code. The other option is BulletPhysics which can also be compiled together with Ogre from CMake if I remember correctly.

at the time I was using 3dstudio max and OgreMax. Is there a pseudo-painless way with which I can migrate to Blender?

If you export all your meshes as .fbx you might be able to import them into Blender. Animations might be harder though, but I am not sure.
I recently got the Blender exporter working on the newest Blender version in just a couple of minutes from here: https://github.com/OGRECave/blender2ogre.
Be sure to download the highest version number and not the one on top (that mistake cost me a couple of hours), so be sure to download v0.8.4 from here: https://github.com/OGRECave/blender2ogre/releases.