so... whats your story with ogre?

[JaJDoo]

i found ogre years ago when i was still in high school (i think in early dagon period, not sure) i downloaded a release more than a few times, and never actually did anything other than installing it.. i remember setting something like 20 different ogre applications that never contained anything other than example application. i always said to myself - "ill just finish the C++ book and than ill start with ogre". i read up to page 500 more than a few times over.

somewhere about six months ago i was released from military service, where i gained some experience programming classes that aren't called Cat, or derived from class mammal. so i started another ogre application and skipped most of the tutorials, since i read tutorial 1 to 5 about 10 times over in the past, forgetting every thing over and over again.

so i set out to build the next Master of Orion. yes, i was pretty sure i could do it. so i wrote some code, got a few spheres to move in ellipses around each other, and decided i need to make them look like planets, so i started looking for a way to make an atmosphere; one thing led to another, and i became obsessed with HLSL, so OGRE helps me unleash my insanity with ease.

whats got you into OGRE?

[Kojack]

I found it back in 2003.
I was a tutor at a games programming college and for various reasons we were using the incredibly crap Auran Jet engine (probably because our head of the programming department was ex-Auran). I looked around for alternatives and saw the Ogre demos, they seemed cool. I tried to push for it to be the basis for a replacement engine after I was able to build a rough asteroids game with great engine particles in very little time with zero experience at it (I built maybe one tutorial first).
There was resistance due to 2 reasons: it's incredibly difficult to compile and wasn't a full game engine. The first was a fairly firmly held opinion by the new head programmer, who insisted he'd tried to use Ogre and it was too hard to get even the samples built. So on his own pc I showed him the whole process: download 2 zips (source and deps), unzip both zips, double click the solution (was a workspace back then I think), press F7, wait a bit. He stopped complaining after that.
In 2004 I finally got to show it to students, having played around with it myself for a bit. We used it for every final game project that year, and won our first indie award at the australian game dev conference.

Now around 6 years later I'm an admin of the ogre forum, a teacher instead of just a tutor, and my college has used ogre for every final student game project since 2004 (not forced, students choose it themselves after I show it off). I teach ogre and mogre as part of a couple of subjects, and I'm pushing for a whole subject dedicated to using it.

[reptor]

I was learning OpenGL and had a dream of creating a 3D application but I noticed soon that the task is massive. So I went looking for a free 3D engine and Ogre3D was one of many I looked at. The thing that convinced me that this is the best choice for me was this very active forum that Ogre3D has. And I have also noticed that Sinbad has a very professional approach to running the project when compared to many other free 3D engine projects out there.

[stealth977]

"I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my
computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise
take me a good ten seconds to do by hand." - Douglas Adams

Umm, maybe off topic but, once i did that, but i was spending that 10 seconds 100 times a day for the next 2 years, so, the gain was far more than the time spent to automate it

That said, i found out OGRE at around 2003, downloaded and ran its demos a zillion times without doing anything programming related. It was 2008 when i checked it again, since i was pretty sure using raw Graphics APIs would be overkill for me. I realized that testing stuff using OGRE was taking too long since i needed to re-write code for anything i wanted to test, so, i began coding Ogitor so i could have almost infinite testingopportunities without re-writing code and here i am....

[JaJDoo]

Umm, maybe off topic

off topic in an off topic.. according to math it makes it a massage relevant for general discussion forum i think..

... downloaded and ran its demos a zillion times without doing anything programming related...

we're so alike ...

2003... i used dark basic back than.. took a tank i made in a pirated 3ds max 3 some friend of my father brought from china and programmed it to rotate its turret and cannon... and never touched it again
made a t-34-85 and a panzer 5.. turned out rather good actually.. haven't modeled anything since (other than a sphere with blender to export to .mesh)

[cybereality]

I have been researching and experimenting with 3D engines for at least the past 10 years. I have at least tested most of the major ones available on the cheap or open-source market. I've used Director, Anark and Blitz3D before finding out about Ogre probably around 2004-2005. I immediately saw the potential of Ogre and realized it was a powerful engine. However at that time my C++ skills weren't so hot. So I put Ogre on hold and spent some years learning C++ as best I could. Now I am a lot more comfortable with C++ so I am getting back into Ogre again. I am planning to build the ultimate game using it and take over the world! Muhuhahahahaha!!!!

[mkultra333]

I've wanted to make an indie first person shooter since forever, I'd been waiting since 2000 for a good, cheap engine. Closest I got was when id released the Q3A engine as GPL, but that was closely followed by a jump in commercial game quality (normal maps, real time shadows) that made the graphics of Q3A redundant.

I also got into stereoscopic gaming, and that pretty much demands DirectX. At that point the plan became to redo Q3A with a DirectX renderer, with normal maps and real time shadows. What I really hoped was that someone else would do it, it seemed obvious... but no one did, so with my rather feeble C++ skills I was going to have to do it myself.

The thing that switched me onto Ogre 18 months ago was that I found it a) had DirectX support and b) had stencil shadows and shadow maps that rendered correctly in stereoscopic modes. That pretty much sealed the deal, and the ability to potentially go cross platform with the Ogl support was a big added bonus.

Been a steep learning curve, I think my coding skills are a notch or two below my ambitions, so things can stall now and then, but overall my project is progressing quit satisfactorily. What I particularly like is that I don't have to worry too much about the graphics becoming outdated, since the Ogre engine keeps moving forward without me having to lift a finger.

[Praetorian]

Hmmm.... I think it was about the summer of 2007 (I was 15 I think), I'd started C++ and working with irrlicht over the prior 7 or 8 months (I sorta dove into irrlicht without knowing what I was doing with C++, but over those months I picked up enough to have a vague idea of which way was up). I had been working on some over-ambitious project in irrlicht, and I was getting terrible framerates (probably mostly because I had a high poly gun model with 2048^2 texture taking up half the screen on my outdated computer of the time... ), so out of frustration I decided to try Ogre.

After staring at the lgpl license for a couple hours (I had the impression from the irrlicht forum that it was a lot worse than it was.... (and of course the MIT license is even better now)), and toying with the demos, I started using Ogre; it took a while to get my bearings, I missed the wiki tutorials (or perhaps they weren't in existence yet?) and slowly reverse engineered the old ExampleApplication framework, but I finally caught on and had a nice little demo thing with physics and such by the end of that summer.

Since then I've learned a lot and have been using Ogre for pretty much every little project I've done, I've switched physics engines (Newton to PhysX to Bullet...) and Audio (irrklang, audiere, to OpenAL) due to whatever issues and gripes, but Ogre's always worked exactly as I wanted.

I "lived" in Morrowind for awhile.

Haha, that takes me back....

[Shockeye]

I got a demo of De Blob from a cd on the cover of a magazine. And in the docs it mentioned that it was written by students using opensource, including Ogre3D.
And then not long after I was reading a magazine article about open source game development - and there was Ogre mentioned again. So I thinks to meself, I should look into this, I should. And this was around about the time VS2005 Express became available, which meant I was getting into programming again because I could finally move on from the by then very long in the tooth VS6.
Free graphics engine & free Visual Studio - clearly a sign!

the incredibly crap Auran Jet engine

Been there too. Hobbyist licensed version that provided no way of importing your own animated meshes

[JaJDoo]

I think it was about the summer of 2007

hmmm

User avatar
Praetorian
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Posts: 83
Joined: Sat Aug 11, 2007 12:37 am

yup, summer of 2007, 12:37 actually

[koirat]

somewhere about six months ago i was released from military service, where i gained some experience programming classes that aren't called Cat, or derived from class mammal.

Can I ask where are you from, I guess that in your country it is possible to use your skills instead of typical military service, what is very interesting approach. I assume it was a conscription.

[JaJDoo]

somewhere about six months ago i was released from military service, where i gained some experience programming classes that aren't called Cat, or derived from class mammal.

Can I ask where are you from, I guess that in your country it is possible to use your skills instead of typical military service, what is very interesting approach. I assume it was a conscription.

indeed, conscription - 3 years (Israel)
originally i was suppose to be a either a tank or MLRS crew, but a few months before service my profile (medical score) dropped even lower than it was to below fighting standard. because i was sure i was going to be in a field unit (and really wanted to) i rejected some offers given to me for alternative services centered around technological backgrounds.
so when i was conscripted i was sent through the regular chain of bureaucracy, and sent to the air force.

funny thing, i ended up in the air force weather forecasting unit in a big underground bunker. occasionally i was sent to week long 'tours' as weather observer, which involved an average one phone call per hour (depending on the weather). i disliked the original assignment, so i asked to be transferred to the unit's research section.

when i was transferred to 'the section' as we called it, we worked in a small tight group of 3 to 6 people ( 1-3 officers, and 1-3 NCO's like me. people were coming and going, so the number wasn't constant). our role was to supply statistical data for operations. we also worked with civilian contacts, some in Tel-Aviv university, some simply clients looking for data.

when i arrived, they were still using an ancient dos like interface with fixed results based on out dated information and outputted to unreadable tables. a few months before i was transferred, my predecessor started creating new data bank made out of huge word files created by automated macros in VB. so i took this stuff, rewrote it ( it had too many logic errors, mainly completely illogical statistical calculations. the code itself was runnable, but never used it because it was so massed up SQL and VB wise that couldn't look at it without having nightmares at night. he was writing scrolls instead of generic code. it was horrible) and expanded on it. i also decided to create the data into excel/csv tables, since it makes the data much faster to produce, more flexible( he was creating another set of fixed tables.. i couldn't let that pass) and much easier to handle.

later on i started working with a guy nicknamed Fima (original Yafim) from the neighboring development/maintenance section (he was the definition of dude, used to come and go as he pleased. some days he wouldn't even show up, others he stayed working till morning) who with his assistance i connected our section to the SVN and made a few small programs to extract data from weather models data stored on our servers. also started building a small applet for a certain repetitive set of calculations the guys in operational (where i started my service in) were stupidly doing over and over 4 times a day. but alas, i never got to finish it (since my commander did not approve, i was working on it in secret ).

edit:
noticed i hadn't ready answered your question; yes, there are many other options, some so prestigious that when some one is released from it he can immediately find a high paying job in the high tech industry. however, it is sometimes really up to luck; a friend of mine, a really bright fellow, ended up fixing generators for 3 years..
some units don't have the privilege of selecting specific individuals from the pool. on other cases, some individuals aren't in the right conscription date to get where their talents can be put to use. but in many cases, people start contacting a unit they want to end up in long before they must report to the mobilization center.
there's also a scholarship program; the army pays for your first degree (and you can enter a university on relaxed requirements) and you give back 6 years as an officer.

[koirat]

Thank you for such a great post.
I was just suspecting it's an Israel.
I like this how the conscription is done there. No wasted skills. No wasted time. It's just that 3 years feels kind of long, or short if you got some great people in your team.

[JaJDoo]

No wasted skills. No wasted time.

some would have a huge argument with you about that.. especially on the 'time' part; but for having thousands of recruits per cycle, things are handled quite well in the past 10-15 years ( my father spent his service fixing generators in remote one man posts in Sinai.. something wrong with the generators in the IDF.. )
the current trend is for each unit or corp to advertise itself and seek recruits from as far as the 10th grade; some units can select candidates them selves (the air force can select pilots before any other branch can touch recruits), some are dependent on cooperation with the recruitment officers..

its actually only 2 years for women.. but after the first year (where you get your training/course and get all the guard duties in your unit) time starts to fly.. before you know it you're a first sergeant dragging your kit bag in the release day.

[stealth977]

@JaJDoo:

Wow, we are so alike...

When i joined the army (conscription? 1.5 years, Turkey), due to my computer skills (!) they transferred me to Personnel Department of the brigade. I was quite suprised when i started work there since the computer skills required was only being able to type in some documents in Word...

Anyway, we were just 2 guys who should handle around 20.000 incoming and 15.000 outgoing documents and naturally it was taking from 8 am to 2 am to finish daily work, 2 hours of the remaining 6 hours was our shift duty which leaves only 4 hours for shower/meal/sleep

So, i did what a programmer usually does. Started with VB Macros to speedup excel/word which helped me gain another 2 hours per day for the usual work but it was not enough. When i tols that i would automate everything, my work partner there said, C'mon how you gonna do it!!

So, i created a Personnel Database application (which i have done a zillion times before for my own companies) which stored and automated the task of creating all regular documents personnel related and it worked out so fine.

The end result was: I was only working 2 hours per day for non-standard stuff, the rest was fully automated while i was hanging out at the military cafe, chit,chatting all day and drinking my coffee , not to mention that my work partner was just dropping by the office to say hi once or twice a day (well, since he had a higher rank than i had at the time, so he was having fun and i was working( ! ))

I even got various awards in the army related to my application and the final award was that, i was released 14 days earlier due to my achievements (for the guys who doesnt know how its like in the army, 14 days in army equals at least 14 months time outside )

The downside was, i had many requests for many different applications by different commanders, but, i was lucky to evade all of those requests

[JaJDoo]

most of my work was centered around access databases; from there i was producing all the automated stuff (downloaded data from the main data base and altered it however i wanted... you cant even start describing how much junk WMO data contain...). i pretty much became an SQL professor. there was no table i couldn't produce.

i got 'awards' too - I'm guessing your ones were also A4 papers with " this awards is given to _____ for his ____ " (so on) in a wooden frame ...
after that my work load was actually growing... my commander had an unending pile of ideas (most of which didn't really make sense). i had a test for non critical things he asked me to do (such as shaving or comparing model results on numerical basis only) - if i evaded it for a week and it suddenly disappeared it probably wasn't really important

when i was released i got 2 months of reserve service, starting from a week after i returned my kit bag... was actually rather fun(had was unlimited access to the officers dining room, and i didn't have to wear uniform);
i was recalled because my replacement came too late, and i had only two weeks to work with him before i left. i got him to a good level at both SQL and JAVA from scratch (just try and imagine giving a one on one 8 hour course every day to someone who had difficulty understanding loops). by the end of the reserve service, and burned away all reserve slots my unit saved for a year....

[stealth977]

Yup exact same awards, with only one difference, since i was the "Personnel Department" (no its not a typo, my commander, a major, got promoted and had to leave for a course for 4 months, making me one man "personnel department" with access to officers dining room as well, since i kinda became a regular soldier with major privilidges )

Anyway, since i was the personnel department, my awards were in the form of "Write yourself an A4 paper Award" so i could type it however i like, except the last one with 14 days early release attached to it, it was from a 3 star general whom i never met and when i read it, oh man it was a full page long one, i thought, damn i must be a very important person (well there were quite a lot of kind words in it)

And yes, i also used access databases since every army computer has the office pack in it and access databases can be opened and hand tweaked on every computer so, of course, i had the time to learn most SQL tricks during the process...

BTW, that "award" template was kinda cool too, sometimes after a planned operation, "awards" are given to some 100 different soldiers in the operation, quite boring to write them 1 by one since they also include identity details, ranks, officer related details etc at the footer all specific to person its being given to, so when a commander tells you write those 100 "awards", it means you are screwed for the next 2-3 days

BUT, thanks to my application, it was automated too,
- fetch details from the database
- fill in an excel template with them
- print
- fetch next....

So, i could go drink coffee for the next 2 hours while the computer is printing them (not to mention all have 3 different copies, 1 for the person, 1 for filing, 1 for the person's family...all different templates..)

Anyway, army was fun for me (cant say the same for other soldiers), i still have a possibility to be called as 1 month reserve for the next 7 years, after which i will be outta age range...If i am called, am sure it will be a lot of fun, since now, i do not really care any rank or commander, not after this age...

[JaJDoo]

wow.. the "press run and go to sleep" routine..

thing is, i live far north, and served in the center, so it was 2-3 hours journey every morning and afternoon (one direction), so i had an agreement with my commander - i stay in the section for the night and keep working, and the next day i was out on my way home by launch time. so i was sleeping in my office with 4 different computers running 4 different codes and kept working on the 5th one... they called me the unit's ghost because i was haunting the guys at the operational with my insanities. one of my favorite things was creeping my head through the ceiling tiles into the sleeping quarters; in the day hours i did it the other way around.
was so incredibly quiet at night underground;

problem was i had the only uncensored internet computer, so people were creeping to my section to stare at facebook and lose whatever IQ they had left. one time i was so annoyed i locked two of them in and went to watch TV. i was hoping to find them dead from hypothermia when i was back (my section was notoriously cold, we were wearing winter coats yearlong) but the shift officer at operational released them..

also had my old crappy guitar there, so i was playing bach and Albeniz to my computers while i was waiting for output or errors/warnings to pop out. though the walls were thin, so i had to keep rather quiet.

edit:
hm... this thread turned into "what your story with the army?"..

[McSwan]

I found it back in 2003.
I was a tutor at a games programming college and for various reasons we were using the incredibly crap Auran Jet engine (probably because our head of the programming department was ex-Auran). I looked around for alternatives and saw the Ogre demos, they seemed cool. I tried to push for it to be the basis for a replacement engine after I was able to build a rough asteroids game with great engine particles in very little time with zero experience at it (I built maybe one tutorial first).
There was resistance due to 2 reasons: it's incredibly difficult to compile and wasn't a full game engine. The first was a fairly firmly held opinion by the new head programmer, who insisted he'd tried to use Ogre and it was too hard to get even the samples built. So on his own pc I showed him the whole process: download 2 zips (source and deps), unzip both zips, double click the solution (was a workspace back then I think), press F7, wait a bit. He stopped complaining after that.
In 2004 I finally got to show it to students, having played around with it myself for a bit. We used it for every final game project that year, and won our first indie award at the australian game dev conference.

Now around 6 years later I'm an admin of the ogre forum, a teacher instead of just a tutor, and my college has used ogre for every final student game project since 2004 (not forced, students choose it themselves after I show it off). I teach ogre and mogre as part of a couple of subjects, and I'm pushing for a whole subject dedicated to using it.

Hi Kojack,
The reason Jet was used was because it was developed in Brisbane Australia, and I think Qantm had a deal with Auran to develop the Australian games industry. I think they were able to get grants from the government cementing jet as the choice of engine to use for students. I don't think Darren was particularly "pro" Auran though, he was somewhat bitter at the way he was treated at Auran. In fact, when Jet started getting shakey, he was the the one who said we should change to ogre ( maybe because he talked to you, lol ?). Your awesome ogre demos with generic physics/sound/ networking/lua scripting back in 2004 were too good to pass up.

Some other funny things that you probably weren't aware of, was that you were at the time getting paid twice as much as any other tutor, and getting more per hour than some of the the lecturers The CEO's (yes we had 2 useless CEO's) at the time were ransacking the company, increasing their wages and getting as much money out of the company for themselves before their inevitable firing in an Enron style of management. 9 managers above me lost there job. There was a meeting looking at replacing you too,(wage related) but all the programming department (including myself) were very, very, very, strongly against it. Eventually, in the first quarter when Qantm got bought out, we made made quarter million in profit in the first trimester

[Kojack]

Some other funny things that you probably weren't aware of, was that you were at the time getting paid twice as much as any other tutor, and getting more per hour than some of the the lecturers

I knew, they told me in the interview.
I also got less hours than any other staff member (less than a quarter of a teacher) so actually earned far less than anyone else there.

There was a meeting looking at replacing you too,(wage related) but all the programming department (including myself) were very, very, very, strongly against it.

Hehe, and I out lasted them all.
I'm currently the second or third longest running employee.

(Before we scare anyone away, this was all years ago, the place is vastly different now and kicks ass. Best job I've had)

How's your ai thingy going? It was cool to see you pop back up in the showcase forum recently. I haven't seen any of the old coding staff in years (except dale, but I've known him since before any of us became teachers).


Hehe, I just searched my hard drives, I still have a working copy of my first ever ogre project used to convince the other staff to give ogre a chance.
I've rared it up and put it here: http://rajetic.users.sourceforge.net/ko ... s_2004.rar
It's a very simple asteroids (no weapons, no collision, but cool particle thrust on the ship) coded in a very short time and only reading maybe the first 1 or 2 tutorials.
It's using ogre 0.13.0, and written a day after I joined the forum.

[McSwan]

Some other funny things that you probably weren't aware of, was that you were at the time getting paid twice as much as any other tutor, and getting more per hour than some of the the lecturers

I knew, they told me in the interview.
I also got less hours than any other staff member (less than a quarter of a teacher) so actually earned far less than anyone else there.

At the hardest point I was only on 28K for 4 days work - lecturing for 28 hours with 4 hours to mark prepare for the next 28 hours Had to work on weekends and my "day off" to prepare the next weeks classes. I think the best part was when I walked into Geordi's Advanced Animation class to say hello, and he said he was quitting and that I had to teach the class right there and then. Still, I had the most fun I've ever had in a workplace there.

There was a meeting looking at replacing you too,(wage related) but all the programming department (including myself) were very, very, very, strongly against it.

Hehe, and I out lasted them all.
I'm currently the second or third longest running employee.

(Before we scare anyone away, this was all years ago, the place is vastly different now and kicks ass. Best job I've had)

I can imagine it'd be awesome nowadays...

How's your ai thingy going? It was cool to see you pop back up in the showcase forum recently. I haven't seen any of the old coding staff in years (except dale, but I've known him since before any of us became teachers).

Yeah, the AI thingy is going well. Have some cool new ideas I'm trying out. Haven't seen many of the old people except for a couple of students here and there either.

Hehe, I just searched my hard drives, I still have a working copy of my first ever ogre project used to convince the other staff to give ogre a chance.
I've rared it up and put it here: http://rajetic.users.sourceforge.net/ko ... s_2004.rar
It's a very simple asteroids (no weapons, no collision, but cool particle thrust on the ship) coded in a very short time and only reading maybe the first 1 or 2 tutorials.
It's using ogre 0.13.0, and written a day after I joined the forum.

How is QGF4 going these days ?

[OgrePixels]

Oh my, I didn't know some of u guys suffered from VB poisoning before too. I used to make business apps in VB and Access about 10+ yrs ago, got burned out, but was apprehensive to do the switch to C++ since I feared leaving my "comfort zone" (RAD app development by drawing buttons and stuff). Then I got unemployed and felt worthless for 3+ YEARS. Finally did it after force feeding myself Bruce Eckel's C++ Volumes. Now I develop highly interactive OGRE - based scientific visualization apps here in the Philippines. Thanks a million guys! And BTW Sinbad, you ROCK!

[dwmitch]

About 14 years ago a friend of mine got me into RPGs and I was already into Mel Brooks so I was inspired to do to Final Fantasy what Mel did to Robin Hood. At the time I only had a Commodore 64 so I was limited to writing text adventures. Two years later I got my first computer, messed around with several engines (Blender, which I still use for modelling and texturing, RPG Toolkit, Game Maker, etc). Eventually I started searching for 3D engines other than Blender's, which at the time was too limited and to this day I still don't know if you can release a commercial game with it.

Ogre was the first one I found but that was back in the days before precompiled binaries. I don't remember the release, but SDL was still required for it. I downloaded the source code, fired up Visual Studio, and tried to build it. Got a bunch of errors, and since I was fresh out of figuring out how to get a console to print text I had no idea what was going on so I kept looking until I found Irrlicht. I did most of my learning on that but once I decided to stop using the fairy and dwarf I ran into problems with the model formats. For one, I didn't like the fact that the formats it loaded were plain text. Someone could easily alter them and pass them off as their own. I also had weird results with models made in Blender (skeletons stretching all over the place, random normals, etc.)

So I did some checking, found you could now get Ogre with all of the libraries and DLLs compiled, and downloaded it. I haven't even been back to Irrlicht's website since then and while it takes more to get a basic program up and running than it does with Irrlicht I'll probably stick with Ogre for as long as it's under development.

[JDX_John]

There was resistance due to 2 reasons: it's incredibly difficult to compile and wasn't a full game engine. The first was a fairly firmly held opinion by the new head programmer, who insisted he'd tried to use Ogre and it was too hard to get even the samples built. So on his own pc I showed him the whole process: download 2 zips (source and deps), unzip both zips, double click the solution (was a workspace back then I think), press F7, wait a bit. He stopped complaining after that.

It's lucky they hadn't yet switched to CMake