FreeOrion

In compile forum it was mentioned that OGRE will be used soon. What is the motivation of using it in FreeOrion?

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Are we talking about OGRE 3D, or something else?

OGRE, Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine.
In this thread tzlaine said that FreeOrion will require OGRE.

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That's great news. To me it looks like we are going to use it for space combat. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yes, we're using Ogre as our combat 3D engine.

Have you considered using OpenSceneGraph? It might be easier to integrate with existing code.

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I considered it, VRS3D, and a couple of others. Ogre looked like the best one. It has tons of extensions and 3rd party tools that will make development easier, and the community can't be beat. The integration of Ogre into the current codebase is already well under way.

I'm very happy about this decision. Not only provides Ogre some neat features like normal(paralax) mapping and many more, but it's also perfectly integrated into 3DS which is my primary tool. oFusion for example, allows me to create everything(models, scenes, materials, even shaders, rigs and animation) inside of 3DS and export it directly to Ogre. Furthermore, it provides Ogre rendered viewports, which means it is truly WYSIWYG.

Ogre also seems to be greatly documented and has a strong userbase, which will allow us to progress faster.

Is it doing anything visible within the game yet? I ask because the version in Ubuntu's repositories is a few releases short of the minimum that's required, and I try and avoid having libraries and pieces of software lying around that are out of scope for the package manager. It's obviously not required yet, as FreeOrion still compiles, but am I missing out on anything (other than being able to help with OGRE integration, of course)?

No.

Elaborating on Geoff's response: currently it's not doing anything and you're not missing out on anything.
All work on integrating OGRE is done in a separate code branch called ogre-integration. (if you don't know what that means don't worry - basically at some point FreeOrion code was copied to a different directory and the OGRE stuff is being done to that copy instead of the version that is usually downloaded)

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