Well, that’s another OGRE release out the door, this time it’s 1.0.6, another maintenance release for Azathoth. Once again it’s packed full of bugfixes, which always gives me pause for thought - every time we do a maintenance release I think ‘right, there’s no way we’re going to build up that many fixes again in another 6 weeks’, but still we manage to. It sort of makes me uncomfortable that this many things still turn up, but it’s fair to say that the majority of the fixes this time were the less serious ones, such as safer behaviour when the user screws up, or memory leak removal in more unusual circumstances. OGRE has actually been extremely stable for some time, but each maintenance release makes it even more robust. This time we added support for VC++ 2005 and XSI v5 too.
Dagon is still waiting in the wings, targetted at the end of the year now although, as always, it’ll be done when it’s done - something that’s especially applicable when doing things in your spare time. My main goals are to implement shape exporting in XSI, for morph animation and facial animation, but it requires that I learn more about modelling those things in XSI first. I’ve already started making my way through the training DVD and it’s really quite fun. I wish I had more time to play around with XSI, it’s a really nice tool.
Given _mental_’s absence lately I’m may also going to need to pick up the point sprite work he was going to do, unless :wumpus: gets there first. People’s time is very unpredictable so we’ll see how it goes. I’d also like to do a HDR demo of some sort sometime since I messed about with HDR in OGRE for a client a little while back and would like to show it in action.
Of course along with all this I have Kadath in the background, which I really must get on with. I lost a fair amount of time due to some personal issues over the last couple of months, and pretty soon it’s going to be early 2006 which was my target for the first version. So, time to crack the whip some more.
November 20th, 2005 at 10:55 pm
It’s funny you mention more bugs creeping up as more releases are made. Just recently we were studying bug occurences through software, and in many cases the maintenance done was the actual cause of the bugs. I’m not sure if that’s the case with recent Azathoth releases.
I need to go through training DVD’s also, I’m currently heavily working with 3DS Max and have spent about 10 hours modelling something very basic. I think tutorials are vital as opposed to self learning, it’d decrease the time it takes to model something very basic.
If you’re wondering why I’m commenting a lot, it’s because I have your site on my live feeds
November 21st, 2005 at 9:31 am
Excuse me!
No, all these are bugs NOT introduced by previous changes. Our testing procedures mean bugs like that are pretty rare, luckily. Having adecent testing procedure is essential to avoiding introduced instability; if you get new bugs a lot after other changes it’s because your testing isn’t good enough. Also, poor quality / hard to understand code makes introducing bugs more common, and we have high coding & readability standards which help to make this less common.