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 :)