Headless Ogre Render System

This is a headless Ogre3D rendering system implementation.

Use Case

This plugin is useful only in a very spesific use case, when you don't have the need to initialize Ogre::Root or to create a rendering window.

In particular it can be used on a headless server that uses Ogre for it's Ogre::SceneManager and the scene nodes provided by it. Optionally you can also load meshes with Ogre::MeshManager.

How to use

You can access the Ogre::HardwareBufferManager singleton and load Meshes via Ogre::MeshManager normally to Ogre. This instance of Ogre::DefaultHardwareBufferManager is created and destroyed by this plugins. Loading meshes can be useful for example on a headless server for physics.

You can access the Ogre::TextureManager singleton but cannot use it for anything sensible. This singleton of Ogre::HeadlessTextureManager is created and destroyed by this plugin.

The following operations are not supported when using this renderer. Some of these will throw an Ogre::Exception with a message explaining the situation.

• Don't invoke Ogre::Root::initialize(), throws and exception.
• Don't invoke Ogre::Root::createRenderWindow(), throws and exception.
• Don't invoke Ogre::Root::setRenderSystem() with this plugins ptr. In theory this can be done, but is not practical.
• Don't load textures to Ogre, this will end up in Ogre::HeadlessTextureManager::createImpl() and throw an exception.
• Don't try to render with Ogre::Root::renderOneFrame, Ogre::Root::startRendering etc. This will crash your application.
• Don't try to access Ogre::GpuProgramManager, it will be null. However Ogre::HighLevelGpuProgramManager is initialized in Ogre::Root constructor.

Building

The CMakeLists.txt conforms to Ogre >=1.7 CMake macros and is ready to be included into your Ogre build.

cd ogre-src/RenderSystems
git clone https://github.com/jonnenauha/ogre-headless-renderer.git Headless

Open ogre-src/RenderSystems/CMakeLists.txtand add add_subdirectory (Headless) to the bottom the the file. Now run Ogre CMake again and build.

License

This plugin is licensed under Apache 2.0, see the LICENSE for full details.