ogre
This is cool - last weekend OGRE was one of the technologies behind an interactive public event called Animation Decathlon, inspired by London 2012, which involved kids in London playing a kind of version of Track and Field via Arduino-controlled custom ’thumping pads’ 😀The images were projected onto the side of Kensington and Chelsea town hall, and the BBC has a page about it. If you think the characters look like they were drawn by children, that’s because they were 😀The characters in the game were drawn by kids from the borough and animated by the creators, Quadratura.
As I just announced on the OGRE site, I was really pleased to find out today that we’ll be participating in Google Summer of Code 2009. This will be the 4th year running for us, and it wasn’t at all a given that we’d be accepted again this year - even though I think we’ve been a good mentoring organisation for the past 3 years, there are always new organisations wanting to get onboard and there are a finite number of places, so I wouldn’t have gotten my panties in a bunch if we’d been passed over in favour of letting someone else have a go this year.
The trouble with developing a project which is not only cross-platform, but is old mature & wizened enough to have users dotted across a whole history of incompatible versions of the same tool, is that you end up having to maintain a ton of project files. Linux makefiles, 3+ versions of Visual Studio, Code::Blocks, XCode, Eclipse - it all gets a little unmanageable. I’ve been meaning to look at cross-environment build managers like CMake for a long time, but the time investment required to port & test, let alone learning how to do it, was daunting enough that it never seemed to make it to the top of my TODO.
Important: the subject matter and parties involved with this legal issue are deliberately not mentioned here; if you are aware of their identities, I ask you not to mention them publicly here in comments, or anywhere else. As some of you are already aware, over the last few months there has been an ongoing legal issue with a 3rd party having allegedly used OGRE code without respecting the license conditions. I hate getting involved in legal disputes, there are so many more useful things to do with time, money, and emotional energy, but nevertheless as custodian of OGRE it falls to me and my company to take charge of situations like this, however reluctantly.
So, now that I have basic service back at my newly reinstalled server, it’s time to start re-downloading clean packages for the software that makes up ogre3d.org. Imagine my surprise when I went to phpBB.com and saw this: Looks like I’m not the only one having a bad week 😕 Current priority is getting the forums back online, watch that space.
Great. I got a call from the provider of the server on which ogre3d.org runs today saying that the server had been compromised, and that they were going to have to resinstall it. Seems that an unpatched flaw in a Joomla! component allowed a backdoor to be created which was spamming. My fault - I should have patched Joomla! more often. But, I’m busy. What’s annoying is that even though I can 100% guarantee that the compromise could not have extended beyond a certain defined scope, since SELinux prevents that at the kernel level, the host has insisted on taking a tough line on this - their unshakeable policy says that a completely fresh reinstall is required, and it has to be done today.
I’m a bit of a grump when it comes to a lot of the Web 2.0 startups of recent years. I still dislike Facebook - originally it was just an in-principle reaction based on their rather irritating child-CEO and his ability to attract vast amounts of investment based on a business plan made entirely of arm-waving and wet tissue paper, but now having used it for a while, I dislike it on its own merits.
Every day I get at least one email from people asking me to manually activate their OGRE forum account because they answered the COPPA question wrong: Honestly, how hard is this to answer correctly? *sigh*
NimbleBit, those cheeky purveyors of nimble bits, recently released a new teaser-style video of their Mario Kart-esque game ZeroGear (based on Ogre of course), which I thought I’d share with you in case you hadn’t already seen it on the forums. I think you’ll agree it’s looking very slick. 😀 They’re currently in beta and are looking to get a little more publicity as they line up for their next beta drop, so if you like what you see, be sure to spread the word!
I was quite gratified to read this post on Wolfgang Engel’s blog, in which he refers to some other posts discussing the recommended categorisation & nomenclature for the various stages / structures of scene rendering. If you read it and you’re an OGRE user, you’ll find them all rather familiar concepts, because OGRE has been based around these principles for years 😀 “SpatialGraph: used for finding out what is visible and should be drawn.