Development:Ogre

Development

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As the rendering backend the OGRE 3D Open Source Graphic engine is currently being implemented. Discussion and advances are posted in this forum thread.

What Will Change With OGRE?

For Artists

Vertex and Fragment Programs (Shaders) 

both low-level programs written in assembler, and high-level programs written in Cg, DirectX9 HLSL, or GLSL and provides automatic support for many commonly bound constant parameters like worldview matrices, light state information, object space eye position etc.

A stock of pre-defined materials and shaders will be available to help the artistic process: designing portable materials (ones that will render properly on older hardware) is not an easy task... but you will be able to define your own if you need to.

For those not familiar with it, this includes support for the following standard modelling techniques:

• Per-pixel phong/blinn shading, anisotropic shading, BRDF techniques.
• Ambient maps (useful for baked ambient occlusion).
• Specular maps and shininess maps.
• Glowmaps (already there, but won't be gone).
• Bump-mapping, Normal-mapping and a few other embossing techniques.
• Bump-mapped environment mapping.

And... eventually, a few global rendering techniques:

• Stenciled shadows or shadow maps.
• Hight Dynamic Range rendering.
• Render-to-target (for cockpit screens, mainly).

Naturally, though, not all of those features will be available initially, but are planned for inclusion.

Textures  

support for PNG, JPEG, TGA, BMP, MNG, JNG, DDS and a lot of other files, including unusual formats like 1D textures, volumetric textures, cubemaps and compressed textures (DXT/S3TC). Textures can be provided and updated in realtime by plugins, for example a video feed - the format of such video feed has not yet been decided, but it will most probably include mpeg and ogg-theora.

Meshes 

• Export from many modelling tools including Milkshape3D, 3D Studio Max, Maya, Blender and Wings3D
• Skeletal animation, including blending of multiple animations, variable bone weight skinning, and hardware-accelerated skinning
• Biquadric Bezier patches for curved surfaces
• Progressive meshes (LOD)

Special Effects 

• Particle Systems, including easily extensible emitters, affectors and renderers (customisable through plugins). Systems can be defined in text scripts for easy tweaking. Automatic use of particle pooling for maximum performance
• Support for skyboxes, skyplanes and skydomes

Misc features 

• loading from archives (ZIP, PK3)

For Coders

There will be a graphics engine with 2 backends. The old OpenGL and the OGRE engine. The engines are glued together with the MyGUI User Interface.

Ogre with all it's extensions, it is easy to implement a semless planetary flight.

The old OpenGL vegastrike mesh format can be preserved. Also The new Ogre format can be used.

Dependencies

You need 4 additional dependencies in addition to those of vegastrike:

OIS

OGRE - at least version 1.7.2

GLEW

MyGUI - at least version 3.0.3 You need to compile the OpenGL platform of MyGUI.

Links

complete feature list of Ogre

Documentation

• Framework documentation
• Graphical User Interface
• Modelling