Just a couple more tutorials

Of course the tutorials remaining are most likely going to be fairly long, but there are only 16 more to go through. 9 of them are in the Mad Marx set of tutorials, which I am hoping to go through fairly quickly since I have read them already. But enough about the future, I will go over what I did over the weekend.

I will start with the 3D art. Notice the lack of picture, that is because I have yet to figure out how to properly render the frame. I was tempted to post the screen image from from the 3D modeling program or import it into a simple Ogre program and see if that worked, but I really just want to figure out how to properly render the image. I was working on a screwdriver which was supposed to have a translucent handle (a yellow handle for that matter, and all I got was opaque red, why I am not posting the image). Hopefully I can get that straightened out by the end of the week. I do have the logo for the log-in screen when I get around to coding it. I may release that when I get the page finished (of course no functionality, but a good technical demonstration nonetheless) but that will probably be a little ways off, right now my main focus is going through the tutorials for Ogre as quick as possible.

Now onto the actual meat of the post, what did I do in Ogre. To be honest not much. I did read through the entirety of the Practical Application tutorial, but had a hard time getting it to compile properly. While I will admit to failing with the tutorial, I did learn quite a few things from it. Probably the most important is the concept of how to construct an executable for distribution. Very few tutorials deal with what needs to be included with the executable if you want to distribute it and this tutorial was no exception. It did however go into good practices for how to manage resources needed by the executable. This involves keeping the executable in a central folder and all additional files needed for run-time in sub-directories. That and he fact that any file pointer, either hard-coded or in a configuration file should be a relative address from the executable since some people may not install or run the files from the same location that they were initially compiled.

The next tutorial was a lessen in linear algebra, a class I have not taken. It was informative, explaining how in order to prevent unexpected behavior, the best way for a camera to be stored is attached to 3 scene nodes. Each scene node handles one of the rotations (about the x, y or z). A good if not difficult read, it also went into how Ogre handles the quaternions (a four part variable holding the x, y, and z displacement of a vector from an origin and the degrees to rotate about said vector) and how some of the similar looking functions actually handle the quaternions.

Finally there was the simple first person camera tutorial. While very interesting, and I will need to implement something like it in my game, it was just a few code fragments from what I saw. Which brings us back to where the post started, what is coming down the pipeline. Probably the next post will have one more In-depth tutorial and whatever I can get done of the Mad Marx tutorials. Hopefully after a week or so the Mad Marx tutorials will be done and I can move onto the Artis tutorials. I am not sure how I am going to finish the tutorials, but it will come down to combing through the Advanced Ogre Framework and the Creating a shoot 'em up with Ogre 3D, hopefully all done by the end of the month.

This will mean that actual programming for the game should have the basic screens, though probably not most of the functionality by early to mid November. Of course that is if nothing slows down the current pace these tutorials are being finished.

~gunnah