Continued success

Well, I am really moving through the tutorials now. Bot sure how long I can keep at them at this rate, but at least this was a good pick up after loosing that time earlier in the month. I will start with the bad news, because of how much time I spent on the tutorials, I never got around to figuring out what I need to package with the Ogre executable to make it run, or if it can be run on other machines. That being said, I finished the four remaining Intermediate tutorials. So I will make a brief note of each of them along with any comments I have about how I can make them applicable.

So the next tutorial after last post was number four. This involved making a two-dimensional box on the screen and using the ray queries to figure out which models, if any, were inside the box. Not much but it does show off how to make a bounding box on multiple targets as well as making 2D images. This unfortunately will not greatly help my project, but it was fun nonetheless. When I get Tutorial 3 up I also hope to upload this just for fun. One thing to note is that this method checks to se

e if it hit by the bounding box which can lead to false positives and will need additional work to make sure when the program registers a hit, it is actually a hit.

The picture to the left is from the fifth tutorial. This dealt with static geometries and how to handle batches of objects that do not move. This may prove a little more useful when I get all of the scenery to add to the maps. O

verall the most interesting aspect was the tutorial was the use of RangeRandom. This little function takes two parameters a returns a number from the low to the high. Besides that, there really was not that much to say about this tutorial, which will probably not get uploaded since it does not have any real interactivity, though I was tempted to add a sky box and really finish off the effect.

Tutorial six was an odd one. I am not completely sure what use it has, other than bat signals. I had though about suing it as a cross hair for the guns, but from what it seems it is a highly inefficient system that would require a few tweaks just to get running. A simpler cross hair would be to just draw one with the GUI in the dead center of the screen. My other complaint about using it as a cross hair was how difficult it would be to see from a distance. This one is also not likely to get uploaded, but as you can see it does have an interesting effect.

Finally tutorial seven was handling textures and using a mini map. The mini map may be an interesting idea, but it would not a lot of work to be useful. They use it as something more for a single player game where you are trying to break in or out of somewhere and they want to show you the guard moving in the bottom corner of the screen. All this tutorial had was a green plane twirling, so it was not even worthy of a picture and is highly unlikely to get uploaded with the other few.

I think the reason these tutorials went so fast is they were introducing an advanced topic but there was only so much they could present on the topic before getting too highly detailed the tutorial would loose its value. Most were just a few functions and fairly quick to make. This leaves me in an odd spot. I have to decide if I am going to go with the Mad Marx or the In-Depth topics. My guess is Mad Marx, but it will probably depend on the amount of set up required.

Well, I think that about covers everything for this week. I added a progress page just to keep track of the different tutorials finished and left to be done. That is also where I am likely to put the spot for the tutorial executable links.

~gunnah