Progress!

Well it has been slow going the first half of September, but hopefully things will start moving again at a normal pace. As you can see to the left, I have managed to finish the preliminary satellite design. The overall look still needs a little work to smooth out some of the edges, but overall I am happy with this. In game, I would use a particle effect of some kind out of the four thrusters (all are visible, but only the very edge of the fourth) to give the illusion of it being held up and the effect increased during movement. Additionally I would like to add motion to two of the thrusters. The two side thrusters need to be able to tilt both forward and back, as well as in opposite directions for forward, backward, turn left and turn right. Also the gun needs to be able to rotate 360 degrees as well as point downward. A particle effect for the flash of the muzzle may be interesting to program in also. Finally, when this is colored, on the base of the gun you may notice an odd protrusion. This is a charging bar which will fire when fully green, setting the bar to red until the cool-down is finished. Most like the only main difference between satellites for the teams will be a logo displayed above the gun (not in the picture, just guessing).

The main goal of Tutorial 7 is to have CEGUI interface wit OGRE and go over some very basic controls in the GUI library. The biggest difficulties should have been compiling CEGUI and getting all of the linkers to point to the right spots. So last post, I explained how I got through Beginner Exercise 7 but was running into a few problems here and there. I found out that it was not loading the GUI because for some reason the dll files which I copied into the OGRE project folder were deleted (I may have done this when I was cleaning out the plugins since I started adding these before realizing the plugins.cfg file needed to be changed a little). After that the program worked like a charm and so that wraps up all of the OGRE Beginner tutorials, now onto the intermediate stuff.

I have already done Tutorial 1, check the 31st of last month for that summary, so it was on to the second tutorial. What held me up previously is that the main controls of these tutorials are handled by a GUI engine and not OGRE. Since I have only quite recently gotten the GUI engine and Ogre to interface, I have been unable to continue my tutorials until recently. Tutorial 2 handles finding a location in three dimensional space of a mouse click. A pre-made world is added at the start of the tutorial and then the GUI overlay is add on top of the OGRE layer. Finally a ray query is used it figure out following the ray from the camera if the click was over the ground and at what location it occurred. Another interesting feature added in the tutorial was a collision detection for the camera so the user can no longer go beneath the terrain. Tutorial 3 was a continuation (part 2 of 2) of the previous tutorial. The main goal in this tutorial was determining if there was something where the mouse was clicked. If there was nothing there, then a model is added to the map, if there was an object already present, then the user can move that object. The tutorial finished with an explanation of how masks work, explaining that masks up to 32 bits are supported by the CEGUI and OGRE combination, as well as a few bit functions.

Since pictures seem a little inadequate at this point, since it is no longer a landscape and objects, but actual user interaction which is now the goal, I am thinking of the best way to handle the sample. Most likely in the next post I will include a download link for the tutorial 3 executable. I am not including it in this post mostly because I am not completely sure that I know everything I need to pack with the executable. Hopefully I will have that figured out by next post.

~gunnah