Orxonox

I think it's time to start a thread about all the upcoming problems and issues that deal with the implementation of Ogre in Orxonox.

To start with, I think we have to consider deriving our own SceneManager. I know this would be a big deal since understanding Ogre on such a level requires a lot of work.

But the benefits could outweigh the effort by far if we eventually have to make a wrapper around Ogre's SceneManager anyway. At least that's how I see it, but with my non-existent experience in game development, my opinion shouldn't be taken into account too much.

It's just something I've been thinking about today and I don't expect anyone to answer this thread, since it is probably too far ahead right now. But I like having it written down once.

Well ok, I can't say much on this topic. I don't know if we really have to build our own scene-manager, but you're right, we'll surely have to change some things (like our "mainloop"). We (beni, nico, me) too don't have much game-dev-experiences, so it's hard to say "you're right" or "you're wrong". but I like your attempts to build your own "project that uses ogre and not vice versa", so you're welcome to bring in as many suggestions as you want to.

But at the moment we have other tasks than ogre, so we postpone ogre-related questions and focus on game-relevant topics. It shouldn't be too hard to change this (mainloop, scene-mangager, ...) later in the semester.

But thanks for writing it down. Every input is welcome.

Hmm, thinking a little bit about Ogre right now couldn't hurt..
I know, graphics is not the main topic at the moment, but for instance I had the following idea today:

We derive our own scene manager and simply add the things we need. But we write it as a singleton. Of course, this restricts the use to only one instance, but do we really more than that?
And even, if we need more scene managers, we wouldn't take that one anyway but the standard from Ogre.
The advantage would certainly be, that this scene manager could do a little bit more than just the graphics. For instace I'm dealing with bullets and its manager. If we were to implement the bullet manager into the scene manager and create it as a singleton I could simply add a new bullet by calling
OurSceneManager::getSingleton()->getBulletManager()->addBullet(..).
Then the rest is up to the physics and graphics engine.

This ultimately means that this derived scene manager would be orxonox's main control structure during active gameplay.

What do you think about such a concept?


btw: my framework for the weapon testing has its own mainloop and I tried to structure it as well as possible.