Ogre 1.7, my first experiences

After a long wait for the inclusion of  branch 1.7 in Gentoo portage, I decided to try installing from an overlay and start migrating my project. The problems started when I noticed that support for Devil has been removed, now only Freeimage is supported. And, guess what, Freeimage has been removed from portage. Not a problem for Windows users, so, ignore that. In the end, I had to install both Freeimage and Ogre manually. Then I found the second problem: Ogre no longer builds a renderer for CEGUI. So, you need to install  a recent CEGUI, lets say, 0.7, and build the renderer. Not a problem, simply a change in the build order: first Ogre, then CEGUI.
But guess what: headers for Ogre renderer have relative references to CEGUI headers, which is not a problem when building CEGUI but creates a big mess when you use an automated build system like scons, which detects such headers at /usr/include.
So, after 3 days Im still unable to run my game and Im seriously thinking to go back to 1.6 or switch to another engine.

New engine: Blendelf

Blendelf is an OpenGL based game engine with some impressive features for a so young software. It uses Lua for rapid development (but also offers a C++ API), shader based rendering architecture (though I disagree with making SM 3.0 required) and more important, already integrates Bullet based physics. It uses Zlib license, so it is free software.
A major drawback, in my opinion, is not having yet an exporter for 3d Max, just for Blender. But as I said, this is a very young engine.

Ryzom code and assets released!

I read in the game programmers mailing list that the source code ant art of the Ryzom MMORPG has been released under GPL and CC licenses. You can see the official announce here and also get the links. Just a couple of things have not been released: the game database (obviously, to avoid user base fragmentation) and sounds and music. The FSF announce also includes details about how to get involved in the development.
Still there are some things left, like the world creation tools, but there is work in progress to let the process be handled with free software too.