Screenshot from the official OGRE Demos pack, from "Fresnel Reflections and Refractions" benchmark. Rendering options: 1600*1200 pixel resolution, OpenGL renderer, 16x FSAA and 32-bit color depth. OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D rendering engine (as opposed to a game engine) written in C++ designed to make it easier and intuitive for developers to produce applications utilising hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. The class library abstracts the details of using the underlying system libraries like Direct3D and OpenGL and provides an interface based on world objects and other high level classes.

OGRE has a very active community, and was Sourceforge.net's project of the month in March 2005. It has been used in some commercial games like Anarchy Online and Ankh.

1.0.0 ("Azathoth") was released in February 2005. The current release in the 1.x.y series is 1.6.2 ("Shoggoth"), released in April 2009. Released under the terms of a modified GNU Lesser General Public License, the engine is free software. The modification to this license allows users to statically link the library under the same terms as dynamic linking, though a distinction made by the LGPL.

General information

As its name states, OGRE is "just" a rendering engine. As such, its main purpose is to provide a general solution for graphics rendering. Though it also comes with other facilities (vector and matrix classes, memory handling, etc.), they are considered supplemental. It is not an all-in-one solution in terms of game development or simulation as it doesn't provide audio or physics support, for instance.

Generally, this is thought of as the main drawback of OGRE, but it could also be seen as a feature of the engine. The choice of OGRE as a graphics engine allows developers the freedom to use whatever physics, input, audio and other libraries they want and allows the OGRE development team to focus on graphics rather than distribute their efforts amongst several systems. OGRE explicitly supports the OIS, SDL and CEGUI libraries, and includes the Cg toolkit.

Currently OGRE is published under a dual license (one being LGPL, the other one called OGRE Unrestricted License (OUL)), to make it possible to be chosen for console development as well, because most of the publishers reject using free/open-source software in that particular market.

Features

OGRE has an object oriented design with a plugin architecture that allows easy addition of features, thus making it highly modular.

OGRE is a scene graph based engine, with support for a wide variety of scene managers, most notably octree, BSP and a Paging Landscape scene manager, along with a beta-stage portal-based scene manager under ongoing development.

OGRE is fully multi-platform, with OpenGL and Direct3D support. It can render the same content on different platforms without the content creator having to take into consideration the different capabilities of each platform. This reduces the complexity of deploying a game on multiple systems. Currently pre-compiled binaries exist for Linux, Mac OS X, and all major versions of Windows.