Two Steps forward

No pictures this time around, I did very little with my 3D modeling projects while trying to get through as much of the tutorials as possible.  With that noted, I finished the Mad Marx tutorials.  What was the biggest thing to take away from them?  try to keep your code in nice easy workable files instead of a long single file.  Each tutorial was suppose to have its own file, which would have simplified the coding a little,. but a lot of the program was reused in other tutorials, so I ended up with the tutorials split into four files.  The first was making an Ogre program from scratch and did not require their headers, so it was alone.  Then 2 through 6, 7 & 8 and 9 &10 were each split into their own executable.  None of them were that much to look at, and they did almost nothing so I am not going to upload them.  So the only tutorial left is the Advanced Framework in the In-Depth Tutorials.  I plan on making this the last tutorial I do, molding it into a base for my technical demonstration which will serve as a base for the game itself.

Now there are a series of tutorials off of the Ogre website.  I mentioned earlier the Artis series of tutorials is mostly missing, but there is a 3D shoot 'em up tutorial, which is divided into ten tutorials.  The first tutorial is setting up the application.  Nothing real new, so it went together fairly quickly.  This tutorial builds on itself so I am not going to post each tutorial, but I may, when I finish and if I feel it is acceptable, post the end-product.  That decision will come at a latter point.  So with the first tutorial done, I moved onto the second tutorial.  Tutorial 2 is level creation (add something to the blank scene seems to be the second level most of the time and this followed the trend).  The code itself was fairly small unlike most of the other level creation tutorials.  This tutorial uses DotSceneLoader header which allows for most of the scene code to go into an external XML file.I had two choices with the DotSceneLoader and since I am trying to learn as much as possible, I went with what was probably the harder option.  The tutorial uses TinyXml which is a little more bulky than the RapidXml recommended on the Wiki.  Either should behave the same to the program (and they do, same line of code would be used with either) but I am having a problem with the format of the XML level, for some reason it does not like the terrain section (the program runs fine when terrain is removed but fails to load when terrain is included.  So I did take two large steps forward finishing Mad Marx and starting the Shoot 'Em Up tutorials, but I have had to take a step back while trying to figure out how to write the XML file so the program will run instead of freezing.
~gunnah