Week 3 – Homework assignments, and more playing around with the Ogre3D engine

                The third week of school has also gone by fairly quickly, and for most of this week, I had worked on getting my homework assignments done, especially the easy ones, in order to make the deadline that is rapidly approaching. With only two weeks left until the easy homework questions are due, I had to work hard on getting as many easy questions done as fast as possible. During last Friday’s lab, I had demonstrated my easy homework question #1 to my TA Daniel, and am glad that I have at least 5 exp. I also tried to work on several other easy homework questions, but those turned out to be harder than I had thought. Some of the easy questions I had attempted to do included the robotic arm, the dynamic texture billboard, and the tree (imposter and billboard) questions. 

The dynamic texture sample included with the TwoLoc engine

With these homework questions, I had ran into some trouble creating a dynamic texture and getting it to display my own texture, even with the help of one of the samples that came with the TwoLoc engine. I also ran into trouble creating the robotic arm and getting the position of each part of the arm to be correct, but after seeing how other classmates have done it on their blogs, I might just have a chance to get it working. The homework question that involves creating two textured trees (one that is an imposter and the other a billboard) has also been difficult, since I am still not 100% clear on how to create a textured tree and turn it into an imposter or billboard. Hopefully by next week I will have finished at least 4 easy homework questions, so that I can be on track and able to write my midterm exam. 

Example of an imposter in a game

                That’s all for this week’s blog for engines, stay tuned for more updates next week!

Sources:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060105/Figure2.jpg

Week 2 – Playing around with the Ogre3D engine, Mercurial, and TortoiseHG

The second week of class has gone by very quickly, and we only managed to get our group together as well as getting the meet up times for programming. To be honest, I’m a little frustrated with how the engine works, as it is fairly confusing to learn and to find out how things work at first. My group members and I shared the same problems while experimenting with the samples included with the engine, such as being unable to create a copy of one of the samples without any problems. One of the major problems that I still haven’t figured out is the fact that the textures used to color the planets were in brackets, like (“rusty red”), and could not be copied over successfully into the new project. This was a major problem, as a lot of our assignments needed textures. Another major issue was that the engine did not come with a function to create objects; rather, in the samples the shapes used were obtained from files similar to Maya files. Finally, the TortoiseHG and Mercurial were a bit confusing to use at first, but gradually after attending both labs last Friday I have finally got the gist of how to use them with Bitbucket in order to update my online repository for the professor to view my progress every week. I find this to be somewhat beneficial, as it will keep us all on track with programming every week, and no more procrastinating. I hope that in the weeks to come, my group and I can understand the Ogre3D engine better so that we can begin to create our game that we had planned already.

                Stay tuned for more updates on my progression in game engines :)