Ogre 14.2 released

Ogre 14.2.0 was just released. This release contains some significant bug-fixes and feature additions, which we will discuss in more detail below. We recommend all users of the 14.x branch to update.

For a full overview of the changes, see the changelog.

ImGui based ConfigDialog

The ApplicationContext can now display a ImGui based ConfigDialog, when you call runRenderingSettingsDialog().
The advantage of using ImGui is that we can get rid of platform specific toolkits like Xaw, which is necessary on Linux to be Wayland compatible. For the other platforms, this merely unifies the UI.
Furthermore, if you are already using ImGui, you will be able to integrate the Rendering Settings into your existing UI using the DrawRenderingSettings method.

The platform specific getNativeConfigDialog() based Dialogs will be removed in a future release.

Vertex Cache Optimization in MeshUpgrader

MeshUpgrader now accepts the -optvtxcache flag to improve the vertex cache utilization of the given mesh.

This reorders the index buffer of the mesh such that triangles are rendered in order of proximity. If enabled, the MeshUpgrader will print the change of the “average cache miss ratio (ACMR)” metric. It measures the number of cache misses per triangle and thus ranges from 3.0 (all 3 vertices missed) to about 0.5 for a convenient mesh.

Note that the algorithm for this was present since Ogre 1.2, it was just not exposed anywhere unless you explicitly processed your meshes by hand.

If you want to know more about the topic, see here. The algorithm in ogre has quadratic complexity though, but should provide better results.

Cleaned up samples

To integrate the ImGui based ConfigDialog, the SampleBrowser and the Samples were refactored, and now resemble more idiomatic usage of Ogre, such as input filtering using the InputListenerChain and interaction with ApplicationContext. This refactoring also led to the removal of a significant amount of boilerplate code.

Ecosystem Roundup

blender2ogre

Thanks to the work of “Guillermo Ojea Quintana” blender2ogre now supports manually specified meshes for LOD levels – in addition to auto generating mesh LOD using Blender or Ogre. See the documentation for details.

Additionally, he did some profiling and we could resolve a rather embarrassing bottleneck resulting in a import and export speed improvement of 10x.

ogre-meshviewer

Again thanks to the contributions of “Guillermo Ojea Quintana”, ogre-meshviewer now has nice ImGui based RenderSystem config dialog, wireframe mode, better LOD level inspection and a “Open File” dialog.