Back in 2005, I think, when Sinbad dreamt up Ogre it was extremely well received and gained traction quickly. It removed a large number of barriers for people trying to get into 3D development, especially for me
. It had everything needed that goes a long side a rendering engine, eg resource management, etc, and it had an easy to use rendering pipeline.Everything was great, at least for fixed function pipeline graphics. As graphics got more complicated and moved away from FFP, Ogre did not really keep up. Many shaders and plugins were created and shared with the community to create pretty scenes but there was never any real attention given to the Ogre core regarding creating a shader pipeline. Maybe the emphasis was too much on flexibility, I dont know, but to some degree this is why RTSS was born, but it unfortunately never gained traction.
Then came Unity and effectively a free UE4 engine which kind of left Ogre dragging its heavy weight heels. Those engines give you great graphics out of the box, and everything else. However people still want to learn 3D programming and/or dont want to use AAA engines and it actually is not that difficult to create a rendering engine yourself as there is a lot of material around now.
We are now seeing a fairly major and exciting shift in GPU programming, which effectively means the 3D rendering API's are no longer actually that easy to use. (Disclaimer: I have not actually looked at any of them
) They are more low level and will require a considerable amount of knowledge, which will increase the barriers of those wanting to get into 3D development. Queue Ogre 2.0 and the great work dark_sylinc has been doing with AZDO. Its now more important than ever that there is library that deals with these low level API's and gives a clear and easy to use API coupled with blistering performance. Furthermore there has been considerable amount of effort put into the shader pipeline, meaning now Ogre can be 'shiny' out of the box. In my view this should be a rendering engines first and foremost priority, as whats the point of a rendering engine that does not given anything more than FFP out of the box?!Anyone got vastly different view!? I know many people have put a lot of hard work into Ogre over the years so hope no one takes offence to this post, I mean none by it, and remember this is all written with the superhuman power of hindsight!
PS. I am ridiculously excited about the first release of Ogre 2.0
