OGRE 2008 User Survey Results!

September 6th, 2008OGRE 4 Comments

I’ve just released a report summarising the results of the OGRE 2008 User Survey. Thanks to everyone who participated, we did in fact break the 1,000 responses mark which was my goal when I decided to  run the survey, I think that’s a statistically respectable number to draw conclusions from.

I intend to give copies of this report to hardware and software companies I need to blag a bit of assistance from, so I think this will do the job. I’m also glad that some of the impressions I got from my work over the last few years were reinforced, such as that there are quite a lot of companies using OGRE for applications other than games.

I’ll write up a forum posting on it when I get a chance (probably tomorrow), but I don’t venture into the forum unless I have at least an hour or two free otherwise I miss some updated threads when I have to rush off! Blog readers get an early peek.

Please take the 2008 OGRE User Survey!

August 26th, 2008OGRE 3 Comments

I’ve copied this message from ogre3d.org just in case there are those that track my blog more often than the main site:

2008 OGRE User Survey

One of the questions I always get asked when talking to other people in the industry is ‘How many people are using OGRE then?’. Compared to regular closed-source software where people can’t use it unless they pay, it’s hard for us to answer this question accurately, apart from pointing at download statistics (approximate 40,000 per month, if you were wondering). However, this doesn’t necessarily reflect how many people are seriously using OGRE.

So, why does it matter? Quite aside from it being nice to know, the practical reason is that the size of the user base influences how 3rd parties perceive us, and specifically how much priority is assigned to support requests we place with 3rd parties such as graphics card manufacturers and driver writers. Put simply, if we can show we have a large number of companies using OGRE for serious projects, the more resources we can get assigned to our support requests.

Since ‘gating’ downloads with forms requiring contact information is both undesirable and impractical in an open-source project, I’m instead running a survey to try to collect this information. It’s not perfect of course, since as an opt-in process it will ‘undersample’ the number of people using OGRE, but I’m hoping it will be enough. Please participate if you’re a serious OGRE user - the survey is short and sweet, and you don’t have to provide any identifying information if you don’t want to. However, if you are able, I would ask you to opt-in to provide a bit more information like your company name and projects, since having specific companies and projects to refer to can probably help our cause.

Thanks for your time!

I’ve had a pretty good response so far, in the last 12 hours or so we’ve had over 250 people completing the survey. However, the more the better! People I speak to at graphics card manufacturers etc regularly tell me that more definite information about the make-up of our user base is important for attracting more support resources to our cause when we need them, so I’d appreciate if you’d help us persuade them :)