// the find
gazebosim/gazebo-classic
Gazebo classic. For the latest version, see https://github.com/gazebosim/gz-sim
Gazebo Classic is the original ROS-compatible 3D robot simulator, used heavily in robotics research and competition for simulating multi-robot environments with physics, sensors, and rendering. It reached end-of-life in January 2025. The successor is gz-sim (formerly Ignition Gazebo), and the project itself is pointing users there.
Deep ROS/ROS2 integration that made it the de facto standard simulator for a decade — if you're reading old tutorials or competition codebases, this is what they're using. The physics stack (ODE with GIMPACT/OPCODE collision, plus FCL) is battle-tested across thousands of research papers. Plugin architecture is well-understood with a massive ecosystem of community plugins for sensors, actuators, and environments. SDF (Simulation Description Format) model library is large and reusable in the new Gazebo.
It's dead. EOL hit January 2025, and the repo is in maintenance-only mode — no new features, and bug fixes are unlikely unless they affect the migration path. The rendering layer is built on OGRE 1.x, which shows its age badly compared to modern alternatives. Build process is a CMake archaeology expedition: vendored deps (ODE, FCL, ANN, libccd all bundled in deps/), plus system dependency hunting via custom Find*.cmake scripts that break regularly on modern distros. Starting a new project here means you're immediately on borrowed time and will eventually redo the migration anyway.