Ogre3D u komercijalnoj igri

...OGRE was accepted as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code 2006. Basically, Google pays students to work on open-source projects over their summer holiday, and we supervise them (and get a little money into the bargain too). They ran it last year too but it was a much smaller affair, this year there are a lot more organisations involved. Google has pretty deep pockets now, and it’s great to see them doing things like this - in 2005 they laid out more than $2m on it...

Filip Strugar: Vrlo zanimljivo! Da li znas mozda (da ne kopam sada) kakva je tacno OGRE licenc - ako uradis igru na bazi OGRE-a, pretpostavljam da mora biti pod istom licencom - open source itd?
Pretpostavljam da je onda source "Pacific Storm"-a public?

Ogre is licensed under the GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL). This basically means that you can get the full source code for nothing, nada, zip. There is such a thing as a free lunch.

Under the LGPL you may use Ogre for any purpose you wish, as long as you:

1. Release any modifications to the OGRE source back to the community
2. Pass on the source to Ogre with all the copyrights intact
3. Make it clear where you have customised it.

The above is a precis, please read the full license agreement before downloading any source.
I realise the license is complicated, so lets extract a couple of the most important points out of it:

1. Because OGRE is dynamically linked, anything you use it in is not a derived work and thus you can license your own software under any license you choose; the LGPL does not 'infect' your software.
2. If you choose to change this, and make OGRE statically linked (we don't support this, but it's possible), your work becomes a derived work of OGRE and is covered by the LGPL too. You must either release your source, or include linkable object files of your work if you do this, so it's not recommended.
3. The license mentions 'inlining' as potentially making the software using it a derived work; however this is mostly an issue for libraries which mostly comprise headers, like template libraries. Inlining in OGRE is entirely for performance and is a small part of the whole, and therefore any inlining of OGRE headers does not constitute a derived work (so point 1 still applies).

If you use Ogre it would be nice if you would display the Ogre logo somewhere in your application (start up or shutdown) for a few seconds. This splash-screen is displayed on the standard Ogre configuration dialog anyway, so if you use that you don't need to do anything extra. The logo is included in the download archive as Samples\Media\ogrelogo.png. You don't have to do this under the conditions of the LGPL, but it would be appreciated.
Using OGRE for commercial projects

Commercial products can be made using Ogre with no limitations other than the ones listed above.

Previously OGRE was licensed under the GPL which required you to release the source code to all of your project (not just the modifications you made to OGRE) which put some people off using it. We had intended to release OGRE under a commercial license in parallel with the GPL for closed-source projects (to give people an incentive to try to use the GPL) but the reality of dealing with all the contractual / legal issues, coupled with the fact that we're all doing this in our spare time eventually convinced us to just license under the LGPL instead.

reject: Ne bih rekao, posto su iza njih stali Buka entertainment, koji su veoma ozbiljni
(barem sam tako ranije zakljucio iz razgovora sa njima), tako da mislim da nista
od public koda.
Mislim da sa svim open-source ekipama mozes da se dogovoris da za svoj komercijalni
proizvod koji je baziran na njihovom free proizvodu ne moras da ostavis kod da bude
public, posto se niko para ne gadi. :)

Filip Strugar: Ne bih ni ja rekao da je tako - ako je nesto opensource onda je licenca uglavnom takva da ti daje da koristis sve sto je uradjeno, ali zauzvrat trazi od tebe da svaka tvoja nadogradnja bude public, i naravno garantuje ti da svaka nadogradnja na tvoju nadogradnju takodje jeste public. Samim tim tu nije samo core ekipa ljudi nego je rec i o velikom broju entuzijasta sa strane ciji je trud otisao u taj projekat, i samim tim ta vrsta komercijalizacije koju navodis nije moguca jer to projekat nije necije vlasnistvo pa da moze da ga proda.

Razume se, moze postojati i druga vrsta licence ali to onda nije opensource - a to je ono sto me zanima kod ovog projekta - kakva je to stvarno licenca?

Da ne bi razglabali ovako napamet, bolje da sacekamo da se javi neko ko stvarno zna, ili da se bacimo na citanje licenci :)

tosa: Sve ovo na stranu, mislim da je Ogre feature-creep engine.

tosa: GPL licenca zahteva da se svaka izmena na kodu objavi, isto važi i za aplikaciju koja koristi GPL software.
LGPL je, cini mi se, blaža varijanta u tom smislu što nema potrebe da se objavljuje kod. L stoji za "lesser".
Koliko se secam Ogre ima i komercijalnu licencu koja košta $50.000 ili tako nešto. Za te pare sigurno niko nece
želeti još da objavljuje i svoj kod.

Sve ovo na stranu, mislim da je Ogre feature-creep engine.

Features:

Productivity features

* Simple, easy to use OO interface designed to minimise the effort required to render 3D scenes, and to be independent of 3D implementation i.e. Direct3D/OpenGL.
* Extensible example framework makes getting your application running is quick and simple
* Common requirements like render state management, spatial culling, dealing with transparency are done for you automatically saving you valuable time
* Clean, uncluttered design and full documentation of all engine classes
* Proven, stable engine used in several commercial products

Platform & 3D API support

* Direct3D and OpenGL support
* Windows (all major versions), Linux and Mac OSX support
* Builds on Visual C++ and Code::Blocks on Windows
* Builds on gcc 3+ on Linux / Mac OSX (using XCode)

Material / Shader support

* Powerful material declaration language allows you to maintain material assets outside of your code
* Supports vertex and fragment programs (shaders), both low-level programs written in assembler, and high-level programs written in Cg, DirectX9 HLSL, or GLSL and provides automatic support for many commonly bound constant parameters like worldview matrices, light state information, object space eye position etc
* Supports the complete range of fixed function operations such as multitexture and multipass blending, texture coordinate generation and modification, independent colour and alpha operations for non-programmable hardware or for lower cost materials
* Multiple pass effects, with pass iteration if required for the closest 'n' lights
* Support for multiple material techniques means you can design in alternative effects for a wide range of cards and OGRE automatically uses the best one supported
* Material LOD support; your materials can reduce in cost as the objects using them get further away
* Load textures from PNG, JPEG, TGA, BMP or DDS files, including unusual formats like 1D textures, volumetric textures, cubemaps and compressed textures (DXT/S3TC)
* Textures can be provided and updated in realtime by plugins, for example a video feed
* Easy to use projective texturing support

Meshes

* Flexible mesh data formats accepted, separation of the concepts of vertex buffers, index buffers, vertex declarations and buffer mappings
* Biquadric Bezier patches for curved surfaces
* Progressive meshes (LOD), manual or automatically generated
* Static geometry batcher

Animation

* Sophisticated skeletal animation support
o blending of multiple animations with variable weights
o variable/multiple bone weight skinning
o software and hardware-accelerated skinning pipelines with intelligent buffer sharing
o manual bone control
o Configurable interpolation modes, accuracy vs speed tradeoffs
* Flexible shape animation support
o Morph animation for legacy applications where you wish to perform simple linear blends between shape snapshots
o Pose animation for modern shape animation, allowing you to blend many poses at variable weights along a timeline, for example expression / mouth shapes to perform facial animation
o Both techniques can be implemented in hardware and software depending on hardware support
* Animation of SceneNodes for camera paths and similar techniques, using spline interpolation where needed
* Generic animation tracks can accept pluggable object adaptors to enable you to animate any parameter of any object over time

Scene Features

* Highly customisable, flexible scene management, not tied to any single scene type. Use predefined classes for scene organisation if they suit or plug in your own subclass to gain full control over the scene organisation
* Several example plugins demonstrate various ways of handling the scene specific to a particular type of layout (e.g. BSP, Octree)
* Hierarchical scene graph; nodes allow objects to be attached to each other and follow each others movements, articulated structures etc
* Multiple shadow rendering techniques, both modulative and additive techniques, stencil and texture based, each highly configurable and taking full advantage of any hardware acceleration available.
* Scene querying features

Special Effects

* Compositor system, allowing for full-screen postprocessing effects to be defined easily, via scripts if desired
* Particle Systems, including easily extensible emitters, affectors and renderers (customisable through plugins). Systems can be defined in text scripts for easy tweaking. Automatic use of particle pooling for maximum performance
* Support for skyboxes, skyplanes and skydomes, very easy to use
* Billboarding for sprite graphics
* Ribbon trails
* Transparent objects automatically managed (rendering order & depth buffer settings all set up for you)

Misc features

* Common resource infrastructure for memory management and loading from archives (ZIP, PK3)
* Flexible plugin architecture allows engine to be extended without recompilation
* 'Controllers' allow you to easily organise derived values between objects e.g. changing the colour of a ship based on shields left
* Debugging memory manager for identifying memory leaks
* ReferenceAppLayer provides an example of how to combine OGRE with other libraries, for example ODE for collision & physics
* XMLConverter to convert efficient runtime binary formats to/from XML for interchange or editing

Alliance: Future Combat
Alliance: The Secret War

franticnick: Izgleda da su "Ankh" i "Pacific Storm" bili samo uvod u primeni Ogre3D u komercijalnim igrama.

Na E3 je prikazana "Alliance - The Silent War" koja po kvalitetu (sudeci po screenshotovima) ostavlja svoje prethodnike daleko iza sebe.

std::geek: A gde se moze pronaci informacija o tome da ova igra koristi Ogre?

sinbad

They've built a lot of tech on top, most notably some pretty awesome shaders. We will undoubtedly get an entry in the docs (meeting the LGPL requirements) when the game ships, I trust these guys. I've known about those terrain lighting shots for approaching 2 years now (I was involved in the original implementation - don't ask me any implementation details because I can't tell you, lets just say it rocks) and just couldn't post anything about it because of an NDA. This is the first I've seen of Alliance though.

There's no link to OGRE on the site for 2 reasons I think - firstly it would probably jarr on what is a slick site, and secondly when you're looking for a publisher it may complicate things. That's also why I've made no announcement about this on the OGRE site or put it in the featured projects, until I've had the nod that they're happy to have that (I haven't heard from them since before E3, they're probably mad-busy right now). They've been keeping this under their hat for a long time and so have I, but once the site went live I just couldn't bear not to mention it on my blog. I'd burst!