And now back to modules, Modules 3: Mines

Well it is time to describe what I did and did not do with the OGRE Engine since last time. (Keep in mind this is the shorter of the half-weeks and the last post was late.) As it turns out there are two Basic Tutorials remaining after last post, and me being who I am jumped straight to the end and finished Tutorial 8 without much difficulty. This was mostly since this tutorial did not require any additional downloads or adding to the libraries I have already created. Tutorial 8 is about multiple viewports which is not really relevant to what I want to make, except maybe with the guided missile and then that may only be changing the camera not the whole viewport. This would be useful if, for example, I was allowing a co-op or multiplayer option from a single computer. Since this is not going to be an option I did not delve very deep, I did want to see what Tutorial 7 was about, but another example I will give in single player: when the screen split and the user character is on one half and the head guard/boss/target is shown moving around an office or whatever on the other, that would be another two viewport scenario, but again irrelevant to what I am doing.

So after doing Tutorial 8, I went back to 7 which is setting up a GUI. I did not realize this, but OGRE handles only 3-dimensional rendering and is not well equipped for handling 2-dimensional screens. Because of this lacking on the part of OGRE an additional interfacing is needed. Tutorial 7 is how to set up CEGUI, but after working with it for a little while I decided it is not what I want. My goal is to keep the game as light, in terms of what comes packaged with it, as possible and CEGUI has a lot of dependencies. So after a quick search, I came across MyGUI, which took forever to set up because I completely missed something. With the newest versions of both OGRE and MyGUI, while making MyGUI in CMake, it is necessary to add to variables to the list (OGRE_SOURCE and OGRE_BUILD) which I was hesitant to do since I do not really understand what CMake does and how it works. Unfortunately, I need to set up a new tutorial application so that I can run MyGUI in OGRE. Hopefully next time I have a little ore to show of this. Also next time I am hoping to have started the intermediate tutorials.

Okay, now onto what I had been meaning to get back to, the modules on the tank. In previous post I have covered most projectile type modules, so now I will cover the final type of weapons: mines. Unlike missiles and lasers which form moving entities which will either hit something or the edge of the map, mines can remain almost indefinitely. To prevent overloading the map with mines and possibly slowing the game down for all players, mines are weaker than projectile weapons. The in-game reason for this, since most people do not care about the logistical parts of the game, is that missiles and lasers require more skill since they can miss where a mine is a guaranteed hit. Mines do have a timer, and will be rendered inert after a fixed period of time (probably on the order of 5 or 10 minutes) or when the player exists the match (to prevent giving kills to players who are not playing). While missiles are handled by the middle set of letter keys, mines are handles by the lower set.

* Basic Mines: A fairly weak form of the weapon, these go off whenever a hostile goes directly over the mine, only type of mine that comes 2 to the module.

* VBM: A more powerful form of mine, while needing to have been driven over to detonate, produces damage in a blast radius. Comes one to the module.

* Motion Mine: When hostile motion is detected inside a detection radius is detected, the mine detonates producing a fairly large, though not quite as powerful as the VBM, blast radius of damage. Comes one to the module.

* Neutralizing Mine: These mines are triggered by being driven over and deal no real damage. These mines do greatly damage the shields and battery power of the tank which drove over the mine. A small electromagnetic pulse radiates out to hit any very close other targets in the vicinity. Comes one to the module.

* Command mine: This does slightly more damage as the Motion Mine also in a radius around the mine. The big difference is that only one of these can be placed at a time per player. The player can detonate the mine after it is deployed by hitting the deploy but again. Comes one to the module.

Hopefully I will have more progress to report next time, but if not (Hurricane and all the fun it brings) I will continue to expand on the last few types of modules shields and then accessories.

~gunnah