OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce applications utilising hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. OGRE has taken part in Google Summer of Code™ since 2006, and every year it's been a valuable learning process for our mentors and organisers as well as the students themselves. 2009 was our most high-profile year by far, despite the fact that we intentionally took on fewer students, because those we did accept this year were of truly amazing quality.
Assaf Raman mentored Noam Gat (aka 'Noman' in our community), who also participated in Google Summer of Code in 2008 and has been an active member of our community for a while now. He did some stellar work on improving the convenience of using various deferred shading approaches in OGRE, and as a result was approached by GameDev.net, a leading online community for game developers, after the summer to write an article on it; his article has been featured on the front page for a few days now. We're all very proud of what Noam's achieved both over the summer and outside it, and he's now officially joined the core team.
Brian Johnstone, a former Google Summer of Code student who went on to become a mentor (he was a student in 2007), guided Zi Ye (aka 'omniter') in 2009, and his work has also been hugely successful; his project was a unified samples framework to replace our ageing collection of demos, and he vastly exceeded even our high expectations. Not only did he produce a fantastic new framework and browser for all our samples, he created a new GUI system from scratch designed specifically to make samples easier to write, created new, more attractive versions of most of the demos, and even created some 3d models as a bonus (outside of the program). He also came up with the idea of making a weekly narrated video of his progress to share with the community which was hugely popular.
Google Summer of Code continues to help drive OGRE forward, and in particular has been a valuable source of new developer talent, while also giving students an interesting and hopefully educational way to spend their summer. Everybody wins! The OGRE Team would like to offer our thanks to Google for running this truly remarkable programme.
By Steve ’sinbad’ Streeting, OGRE team lead, and Assaf Raman, OGRE core team member
