• OgreMain
  • Extract the overlays from OgreMain and transform it into a own overlay component
  • Progressive Mesh improvements and new Mesh LOD sample.
  • Loads of documentation updates
  • Added Mesh::mergeAdjacentTexcoords to collapse two adjacent texcoords into one (i.e. float2 texcoord0 & float2 texcoord1 become float4 texcoord0)
  • According to the documentation, the default SceneManager ambient light should be black, which is wasn't though.
  • SceneManager: updateSceneGraph should happen BEFORE prepareShadowTextures.
  • AtomicScalar operators should be returning their value. Only affects using GCC or Clang.
  • New class ProgressiveMeshGenerator to degenerate mesh detail at runtime.
  • Bug fix for Sphere::merge. Inaccurate results can occur if one sphere does not fully encompass the other.
  • New LOD strategies ‘distance_box’ and ‘screen_ratio_pixel_count’. Details, see Ogre Manual.
  • SharedPtr moved to use atomics (related API change see below in the porting notes).
  • SubMesh has a new method: clone(const String& newName, Mesh *parentMesh) to perform deep copies of SubMesh objects. The second parameter is optional and can be used to reparent a SubMesh.
  • Removed Configfile::load(const String& filename, const String& resourceGroup, const String& separators, bool trimWhitespace) because it can easily be ambiguous. If you wish to load from a resource group, use the existing function loadFromResourceSystem. The arguments are identical to the removed function. See OGRE-175.
• New Volume Rendering component with LOD. See GSoC 2012 Volume Rendering
• Many Terrain improvements.See GSoC 2012 Terrain Improvements
• RTSS
  • Changed error handling of RTSS sub-render state parameter creation. Sub-render state now throws exception on errors
  • Added 2 new demo samples: multiple lights and textured fog
• CgProgramManager
  • Added support for high-level output profiles glslv/glslf/glslg and hlslv/hlslf (glslg not fully working yet)  

• Android Port
  • Remove eclipse based android port
  • CMake based build support
  • Create find Ant / NDK packages (currently Ant and the NDK must be in the global path)
  • Generate android make files for the sample browser
  • Use android tool chain to compile OGRE as static lib
  • Cleanup RTSS (Remove OgreStringSerialiser)
  • Improve platform integration
    • Add Android log listener into OgreRoot
    • Disable Filesystem- / Zip- / EmbeddedZip- Archives on android
    • Resource system improvements
    • OgreAPKFileSystemArchive to handle file access inside the APK
    • OgreAPKZipArchive so we can handle zip files inside the APK (APK is also compressed using zip)
  • Improve EGL support
    • Create concrete subclasses of EGL-Support/Window/Context
    • Handle context creation / configs inside OGRE
    • Resource recreation / Handle it like DX device lost / restore
      • Add managed resource class which every resource derive from (only active on Android – handled via macros)
      • Recreation of Texture, Shader, HardwareVertexBuffer
  • ETC1 texture codec
    • PKM support
  • Sample browser
    • Add touch input support
    • Build a APK file via CMake command line
    • Add rotation support
    • Fix / Enable more samples
      • Compositor not working
  • Improve CPU/ vendor detection
  • Add how to build it on Linux / OSX / Win32
  • Provide pre-compiled dependencies
  • Fix our dependencies so the can compile against the android tool chain
• Windows Metro style application (WinRT)
  • Add support as a new platform (named WinRT).
  • Create a WinRT project for the sample browser.
  • Create a how to compile file.
  • Get all existing samples to work with the D3D11 render system.
    • Multi monitordevice support.
• Windows Phone 8 port.
• OS X
  • Add a helper function to get a sandbox friendly temp file name for iOS and OS X.
  • Other fixes to file handling in response to App Store rules.
  • Support for building with libc++ on OS X.
  • Proper example of DisplayLink usage in the SampleBrowser.
  • Plugins and components are now built as frameworks.
  • Add escape key as a shortcut for Cancel. Fix crash when hitting cancel as well.

• DirectX 11
  • Improvements from GSoC project.
  • Add tessellation shaders support.
  • Add tessellation sample.
  • Add dynamic linking support.
• DirectX 9Ex support
• Added OpenGL 3+ RenderSystem. Still marked as experimental and under heavy development.
• OpenGL ES
  • GLES 2 terrain support.
  • OpenGL ES state and uniform caches.
  • Rewrote PVRTC codec, adding cube map, 3D and mipmap support. Only files created with PVRTexTool are supported now, not Apple's texturetool utility.
  • Experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 support.
• GL RenderSystem
  • GLEW updated to 1.9.0.
  • Remove restriction that all GLSL programs have the same matrix order when linking.

Sample_Grass
# create entity “Ground”, w/ plane mesh, material “Examples/GrassFloor”, which is in “media/materials/scripts/Examples.material”. A simple decal texturing material.

# create mesh “grass”, w/ material “Examples/GrassBlades”, and then entity “Grass”. The way of writing vertex/index can be referred to in createGrassMesh. “Examples/GrassBlades” uses “Grass.cg”, and the effect of grass waving is achieved here in the vertex shader.

# create Ogre::StaticGeometry, w/ name “Field”. About Ogre::StaticGeometry:
http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=Intermediate+Tutorial+5

# The effect of fireflies in the grass is achieved by sprite (in OGRE, it's billboard and flare material). The moving track is spline animation track (see the sample of Camera Tracking). Another point is to use a controller to dynamically adjust the lightness and sizes of the billboards. This is about taking care of details to achieve a beautiful scene.

Sample_Instancing
The sample uses Geometry Instancing to render a large amount of objects, and also compares Instanced Geometry, Static Geometry, with Entity Geometry (directly draw N entities).

The remarks of Ogre::StaticGeometry:
http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/api/html/classOgre_1_1StaticGeometry.html#details

The remarks of Ogre::InstancedGeometry:
http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/api/html/classOgre_1_1InstancedGeometry.html#details


Sample_Isosurf
The metaball effect using vertex / geometry shaders.


Sample_Lighting
A nice sample. It uses render priority and hardware occlusion query to adjust the lightness of the light flares when they are partially/fully occluded.

An introduction of hardware occlusion query:
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter06.html


Sample_NewInstancing
Demonstrates how to use Ogre::InstancedManager, which is supposed to be an advanced way compared to the methods in Sample_Instancing.

In Sample_NewInstancing::switchInstancingTechnique,
– create mCurrentManager (Ogre::InstanceManager), w/ name “InstanceMgr0”, mesh name = “robot.mesh”, technique = InstanceManager::ShaderBased.

– Sample_NewInstancing::createInstancedEntities calls mCurrentManager->createInstancedEntity 50×50 times, which creates 50×50 Ogre::InstancedEntity(s).

The sample can switch materials. One set of the materials:
static const char *c_materialsTechniques[] =
{
    “Examples/Instancing/ShaderBased/Robot”,
“Examples/Instancing/VTF/Robot”,
“Examples/Instancing/HWBasic/Robot”,
“Examples/Instancing/VTF/HW/Robot”,
“Examples/Instancing/VTF/HW/LUT/Robot”,
“Examples/Instancing/ShaderBased/Robot”
};

mapped to (c_materialsTechniques[3] and c_materialsTechniques[4] are both mapped to HWInstancingVTF)
enum InstancingTechnique
{
  ShaderBased,           //Any SM 2.0+ @See InstanceBatchShader
TextureVTF,            //Needs Vertex Texture Fetch & SM 3.0+ @See InstanceBatchVTF
HWInstancingBasic, //Needs SM 3.0+ and HW instancing support @See InstanceBatchHW
HWInstancingVTF, //Needs SM 3.0+, HW instancing support & VTF @See
                                     //InstanceBatchHW_VTF
InstancingTechniquesCount
};

The official article about Ogre::InstancedManager:
http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=59902

Vertex Texture Fetch (VTF) related:
http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/manual/manual_24.html

The implementation and meaning of each technique/material pair are not investigated here. Leave them for future research.

virtual void SampleContext::createInputDevices()
{
    OIS::Object* obj = mInputMgr->createInputObject(OIS::OISKeyboard, true);
    mKeyboard = static_cast<OIS::Keyboard*>(obj);
    mMouse = static_cast<OIS::Mouse*>(mInputMgr->createInputObject(OIS::OISMouse, true));

    mKeyboard->setEventCallback(this);
    mMouse->setEventCallback(this);
}

where mKeyboard (OIS::Keyboard) and mMouse (OIS::Mouse) belong to SampleContext (see My OGRE working journal vol.1). SampleContext inherits from OIS::KeyListener and OIS::MouseListener, so in th above code snippet, setEventCallback method is used to register SampleBrowser in mKeyboard and mMouse, and therefore we can implement keyPressed, keyReleased, mouseMoved, mousePressed, mouseReleased methods in SampleBrowser. This is a general way for a graphics engine to handle the user input events.
 
The function call sequence after a user clicks a sample:
SampleBrowser::mouseReleased
→ mTrayMgr->injectMouseUp // mTrayMgr (SdkTrayManager) belongs to SampleBrowser
    → w->_cursorReleased     // links to OgreBites::Button::_cursorReleased
                                              // w is from mWidgets, belonging to SdkTrayManager.
        → mListener->buttonHit  // mListener (SdkTrayListener) 即是 SampleBrowser.
            → SampleBrowser::runSample( ) // loads/starts the sample

In spoken language, what the above does is that clicking the mouse triggers SampleBrowser::mouseReleased, which delegates the task to SampleBrowser:: mTrayMgr. SampleBrowser:: mTrayMgr then calls SampleBrowser::buttonHit, where the implementation can be customized. SampleBrowser:: mTrayMgr manages the GUI components (OgreBites::Widget), and here is the class diagram:

Ogre::Root 
Ogre::Root is a big managing class, and the main rendering loop is in Root::startRendering. mRoot (Ogre::Root) belongs to OgreBites::SampleContext, and there is also mRoot in OgreBites::Sample. It should be noted that Ogre::Root inherits from Ogre::Singleton<Root>, and is a singleton. The mRoot in OgreBites::Sample is actually the same instance as the one in OgreBites::SampleContext.

# Here is the code snippet about how to generate a spline animation track:

// set up a 10 second animation for our camera, using spline interpolation for// nice curves
Animation* anim = mSceneMgr->createAnimation("CameraTrack", 10);
anim->setInterpolationMode(Animation::IM_SPLINE);

// create a track to animate the camera's node
NodeAnimationTrack* track = anim->createNodeTrack(0, camNode);

// create keyframes for our track
track->createNodeKeyFrame(0)->setTranslate(Vector3(200, 0, 0));
track->createNodeKeyFrame(2.5)->setTranslate(Vector3(0, -50, 100));
track->createNodeKeyFrame(5)->setTranslate(Vector3(-500, 100, 0));
track->createNodeKeyFrame(7.5)->setTranslate(Vector3(0, 200, -300));
track->createNodeKeyFrame(10)->setTranslate(Vector3(200, 0, 0));

The entry function of OGRE SDK samples is OgreBites::SampleBrowser::go, which dynamically links to SampleContext::go.


The OGRE official SDK samples OgreSDK_vc10_v1-8-1 wraps multiple (36) sample modules and SampleBrowser into one Visual Studio solution, with the dependencies between the projects. Therefore when I needed to build the projects in development, I needed to build all projects (because of the dependencies). It wasted lots of time, so I decided to pull the SampleBrowser project out of the solution, which should decouple the dependency between SampleBrowser and other sample projects (I was only using the dlls of the sample projects).

When I was running the SampleBrowser project, it happened that an exception was thrown. After tracing down, I found the problem was in the OgreMain module, so I decided to build the OgreMain module by myself with the OGRE source ogre_src_v1-8-1_1. The building was pretty troublesome, including:

• Built and managed the dependency libraries, including spending lots of time in building the boost library.
• Generated the solution-project hierarchy in Visual Studio via the OGRE provided CMake. Pulled the OgreMain project out, including the Visual Studio project settings and source file selection.      

So far the problem of throwing exception could be reproduced. After fixing the problem, the single SampleBrowser project was also completed. Here are some notes when I was working on the above tasks:

• The methods of error handling in OGRE are assertion and log.
• The macros of the testing project should be consistent with the test target project, otherwise memory access violation occurred (e.g., the macros of the testing project should contain USE_RTSHADER_SYSTEM).
• When there are lots of dependencies in a project (e.g., SampleBrowser), the management of the dependent libs/dlls is very important.   

Here is the architecture of OGRE samples for future reference.

• OIS::Keyboard* mKeyboard; // a reference pointer from the engine
• OIS::Mouse* mMouse; // a reference pointer from the engine
• FileSystemLayer* mFSLayer; // a reference pointer from the engine
• Ogre::SceneManager* mSceneMgr; // created/destroyed by the sample
• Ogre::RTShader::ShaderGenerator* mShaderGenerator; // a reference pointer from the engine

• + _setup
• + _shutdown
• + frameStarted
• + frameRenderingQueued
• + frameEnded
• # locateResources
• # loadResources
• # unloadResources
• # createSceneManager
• # setupView
• # setupContent
• # cleanupContent
• # unloadResources

• + frameRenderingQueued
• + _setup
• + _shutdown
• # setupView