ogre – Nuclex Games Blog

Ogre 1.8.0 for WinRT/Metro

June 18, 2012May 19, 2016 Cygon

In March I provided some binaries of Ogre 1.8.0 RC1 that were based on Eugene’s Metro port of Ogre, allowing Ogre to run as a native Metro App, using the Direct3D 11 renderer and RTShaderSystem for dynamic shader generation.

Those binaries no longer work with the Windows 8 Release Preview and Visual Studio 2012 RC, so I thought I’d provide an updated package!

This time I went a bit further: while the last package was compiled with multithreading disabled, I have in the meantime ported Boost 1.50.0 to compile on WinRT (using a slightly modified version of Shawn Hargreaves’ WinRT CreateThread emulation code. Thus, this Ogre build has full support for multithreading and includes Boost!

Targeting Win32 and WinRT/Metro at the Same Time

May 10, 2012May 20, 2016 Cygon

I’ve seen some developers assume that if you write an App for WinRT/Metro, you have to write it exclusively in C++/CX, a variant of C++ with lots of Microsoft-specific extensions. In reality, you only really need C++/CX to interface with WinRT, but everything under that layer can be clean ISO C++! In this post I’ll explain how I’m designing my Ogre game to run inside Windows’ Metro UI while still supporting other platforms such as Win32, Android and iPhone on the same code base.

A good start is to look at what’s different between a normal desktop application and a Metro application and then develop a design concept where these differences are abstracted or wrapped so the core game code does not need to know about them.

Ogre 1.8.0 RC1 for WinRT/Metro

March 29, 2012May 19, 2016 Cygon

Here’s an interesting hypothesis: when Apple started its App Store, it was the El Dorado of software developers. Now Microsoft is adding an App Store to Windows 8. The Windows user base is huge, much larger than even the number of people running around with iPhones in their pockets (some estimates I came across average to around 75 million iPhone users [1] [2] versus around 600 million Windows users [3] [4]). Even if Windows 8 adoption rates are as bad as Vista’s you could turn a mighty profit!

What better way could there be to achieve that than to publish a 3D game on the Windows App Store when most of the world’s developers are still trying to get a grasp of WinRT? :)

Of course I wanted to use an existing 3D engine, so I reviewed my options:

Engine	Status
Ogre 3D	A user named Eugene on the Ogre forums already did all the work required fixing invalid API calls so Ogre compiles and validates on WinRT. This is what this post is about!
C4 Engine	No word on WinRT/Metro support. C4 is based on OpenGL, but Windows App Store only allows Direct3D 11 to be used. I’ve seen someone on C4’s forums working on a Direct3D 11 renderer, so if its source is released, C4 users might get lucky.
Unity	I believe Unity is well positioned for Metro support (they have an experimental Direct3D 11 renderer, I wouldn’t rule out porting Mono to WinRT either). No official statement yet and I’ll not risk betting on some kind of surprise. You can vote for Unity WinRT/Metro support here.
Axiom 3D	Axiom 3D is a .NET rewrite of Ogre. Work on a SharpDX renderer is on its way, and SharpDX will support WinRT/Metro. Sadly, Axiom 3D is severely understaffed, thus, despite fantastic people like Borrillis, the massive size of the code base means it’s moving slowly.

Mogre 1.7.3

August 2, 2011April 17, 2012 Cygon

My last contact with Ogre 3D had been in 2008, when I had created an experimental x64 build (back then, OpenJPEG, FreeImage and some other dependencies didn’t yet build in x64 by default).

This worked out fine, but I didn’t find the time to actually do anything with Ogre. Finally, during the past weekend, I took a closer look at Mogre, a C++/CLI-based wrapper that enables you to use Ogre in .NET languages.

7 Engines You Should Know

December 5, 2007June 4, 2012 Cygon

This post is not exactly related to .NET/XNA game development, but I like to keep track of what’s going on in the world out there and I still like C++ better than C# ;)

Having played the whole engine shopping game more than once, here are 7 engines I’d take a closer look at if I were to write a game in C++. I’ve listed them in order of personal preference, but be warned, this is entirely my opinion and not based on proper research!

Notice

Old Content!

I blogged this 5 years ago and things have changed quite a bit since then. Today (2012), I’d recommend Unity for most cases and for special needs use either C4 Engine (built-in editor, volumetric terrain) or Ogre 3D (volumetric terrain, sky + water simulation, Android/iPhone/WinRT+Metro support).