Basically, there are some tasks that just bore me. Texture loaders, managers, font rendering, image loading, object loading, etc. Basically, anything that stands in the way of actually putting a game together.
About a week before Christmas I started looking into game engine frameworks that could be used to save a lot of time. I tested out a few before looking into OGRE3D ( www.ogre3d.org ) , which seems to be implemented in a straightforward way (in fact, even basic classes like Vector3, etc. are implemented almost identically to the ones I've been using already... their coders must have a copy of the same book.).
After an immensely frustrating week battling with CMake, XCode, building from source, fixing dependencies, installing boost, uninstalling boost... I was beginning to get the impression that I had wasted a lot of time. However, a week later (and thanks to some very kind and helpful people on the OGRE forums), I'm working with Ogre3D and really enjoying it. It handles things in a very intelligent way, meshes are loaded into the scene and attached to nodes and everything works on a heirarchical basis.
It also has a nifty Terrain engine with LOD and texture paging which is kinda cool...It's cross platform, so now I'm hoping to just plug in the GameWorld class I've been using so far and pretty much stop using the GameEngine class that's been wrapping it so far.
Also, OGRE supports lots of different object and texture formats so there's no tedious MDL loading routines etc. to write.
Perhaps I can start putting the 'game' into this now. :)
First, image no worky. Me sad :(
ReplyDeleteSecond, how DARE you use a third-party engine?! Don't you know that it's a rite of passage to write your own? Back in MY day we all wrote custom, incompatible, frequently horrible renderers and we LIKED IT!
No, seriously, I'm glad you found something that works for you. And since my games are fairly similar to yours mechanically, I may give OGRE a try.
Haha! I assure you back in day I wrote some horrible renderers and LOVED IT!
ReplyDeleteIn fact, here's an embarrassing link to a LOD engine I wrote a while back...
http://www.flipcode.com/archives/09-21-2000.shtml
2000 eh... how time flies.
I think it's more that I'm very keen to work on the game logic side of things when a peer-tested group has thrashed out the implementation side of things.
In fact, I'll be using my own terrain renderer as the one included isn't suitable.
But being able to knock up stuff in Blender3D and put it straight into the engine is incredibly exciting (as sad as that sounds!). :)
Also, it means that Win32 versions can use Direct3D and Mac/Linux OpenGL without any problems.
I'd heartily recommend OGRE, if for no other reason to see if it's a suitable framework for knocking up games quickly. There's only so many times I like writing the same code over and over again... ;D