An ogre (feminine: ogress) is a large, cruel and hideous humanoid monster, featured in mythology, folklore and fiction. Ogres are often depicted in fairy tales and folklore as feeding on human beings, and have appeared in many classic works of literature. In art, ogres are often depicted with a large head, abundant hair and beard, a voracious appetite, and a strong body. The term is often applied in a metaphorical sense to disgusting persons who exploit, brutalize or devour their victims. Ogres are oftentimes boring creatures used to habit and not coming out at night.
The word ogre is of French derivation, and is believed to have been coined by either Charles Perrault (1628-1703) or Marie-Catherine Jumelle de Berneville, Comtesse d' Aulnoy (1650-1705), both of whom were French authors. Other sources say that the name is derived from the word Hongrois, which means Hungarian. The word ogre is thought to have been inspired by the works of Italian author Giambattista Basile (1575-1632), who used the Neapolitan word uerco, or in standard Italian, orco. This word is documented in earlier Italian works (Fazio degli Uberti, XIV cent.; Luigi Pulci, XV; Ludovico Ariosto, XV-XVI) and has even older cognates with the Latin orcus and the Old English orcnēas found in Beowulf lines 112-113, which inspired J.R.R. Tolkien's Orc. All these words may derive from a shared Indo-European mythological concept (as Tolkien himself speculated, as cited by Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, 45). Some see the french myth of the ogre as being inspired by the real-life crimes of Gilles de Rais.
The first appearance of the word ogre in Perrault's work occurred in his Histoires ou Contes du temps Passé (1697). It later appeared in several of his other fairy tales, many of which were based on the Neapolitan tales of Basile. The first example of a female ogre being referred to as an ogress is found in his version of Sleeping Beauty, where it is spelled ogresse. The Comtesse d' Aulnoy first employed the word ogre in her story L'Orangier et l' Abeille (1698), and was the first to use the word ogree to refer to the creature's offspring.
Literature for children is rife with tales involving ogres and kidnapped princesses who were rescued by valiant knights, and sometimes peasants. Ogres are also popular in fantasy fiction, such as C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, and in various fantasy games.
Ogre is often used metaphorically, as in the association of ogres with Nazis made in Michel Tournier's novel Le Roi des aulnes (1970; The Ogre). Other modern works depicting ogres include L'Ogre (1973) by Jacques Chessex, and Nacer Khemir's L'Ogresse (1975), a collection of Tunisian tales.
Ogres appear in many popular fantasy roleplaying and video games series such as AdventureQuest, The Battle for Wesnoth, Guild Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Eternal Lands, EverQuest, Final Fantasy, Flintloque, Magic: The Gathering, Ogre Battle, Quake, Ragnarok Online, RuneScape, Sacred, Tekken 3, Two Worlds, Warcraft, Warhammer Fantasy , The Spiderwick Chronicles and Black & White. See also Ogre (disambiguation).
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 Ankh and Pacific Storm.
1.0.0 ("Azathoth") was released in February 2005. The current release in the 1.x.y series is 1.6.0 ("Shoggoth"), released in August 2008. Released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, the engine is free software.
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.
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.
OGRE also supports Vertex and Fragment programs along with custom shaders written in GLSL, HLSL, Cg and assembler.
The landscape scene manager has support for Progressive LOD, which can be automatically or manually created.
The animation engine has full support for hardware weighted multiple bone skinning, which can be fixed across several poses for full pose mixing.
OGRE also has a compositing manager with a scripting language and full screen postprocessing for effects such as HDR, blooming, saturation, brightness, blurring and noise. A particle system with extensible rendering and customizable effectors and emitters.
The libraries also feature memory debugging and loading resources from archives.
There are content exporter tools available for most 3D modelers around including 3D Studio Max, Maya, Blender, LightWave, Milkshape, Sketchup and more.
A full overview of the features provided by OGRE can be found here
The version branch names, Hastur for 0.15.x, Azathoth for 1.0.x, Dagon for 1.1.x and 1.2.x, Eihort for 1.3.x and 1.4.x, Shoggoth for 1.5.x and 1.6.x, have been named after members of an ancient race of fearsome deities called the Great Old Ones in the Cthulhu mythology of H. P. Lovecraft.
A brief history of OGRE, and its milestones: Around 1999: Sinbad realises that his 'DIMClass' project, a project to make an easy to use object-oriented Direct3D library, has become so abstracted that it really doesn't need to be based on Direct3D any more. Begins planning a more ambitious library which could be API and platform independent. February 25 2000 : Sourceforge project registered, OGRE name coined. No development starts due to other commitments but much pondering occurs. February 2005: Ogre v1.0.0 "Azathoth" Final Released - resource system overhaul, hardware pixel buffers, HDR, CEGui, XSI exporter March 2005: Ogre is 'Project of the Month' on Sourceforge November 4 2005: Ankh is released as the first commercial product using Ogre May 7 2006: Ogre 1.2 "Dagon" is officially released March 25 2007 : Ogre 1.4 "Eihort" is officially released
Alternatively, there's also the Axiom Engine available for C# and other .NET languages, which, instead of wrapping OGRE, tries to implement the same/similar APIs and features in C#.
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