In my last post I wrote about my switch to Ogre3D and I did not post any picture. Shame on me. So far its not very exciting and you can only see a wireframe of a terrain and two trees.
wireframe landscape
The trees are a fast hack in blender and converted by OgreXMLConvert to the .mesh format used by the the graphic engine.
More about my never-ending-hobby-project. Last year in july I played around again with Ogre3D and now I finally switched my graphic development environment form Irrlicht to Ogre.
It was a hard decision between two good projects and there was also a big bunch of work connected to the change. But to learn something new is one of the major aims beside having fun and creating a game. Now the first basic application is running, many pages of documentation have been read, and I got some skills in Blender (but thats a different story).
The reason I took the workload on me to change the engine was to get a specialized graphic engine with support for all mayor platforms (Mac, Linux, Windows). For getting a specialized graphic engine with many features, tools and a big community I “pay” the price to use third party tool kits for example input handling or window system.
If you are searching for a toolkit to visualize something in 3D, control the output via mouse or keyboard and navigate thru the virtual world without reading many sides of documentation and many writing many lines of code than the right choice is Irrlicht for you. Its easy to master the basics, clean API, runs on many platforms, compact all in one solution and has a very good render performance.
If you want a graphic engine which does perfect graphic rendering with high performance but nothing else than Orge3D is the right choice you.
Long time ago I have had a look at some 3D render engines and one of them was Orge3D.
Last time I tried Ogre3D it was only available as a beta version and after some tutorials and small test programs I have written I came to the conclusion it was not stable enough (but already very nice to handle). Because the Orge could not stand very stable on the ground I followed the Irrlicht.
Due to some links I came back to the Ogre website and was curious what has changed in the last years and tried to compile the source version. It works nearly perfect and the forum gave me the last hints. After 1 hour I have had a running version and could enjoy the demos.
Now lets play a bit around with it. Perhaps its a friendly Ogre….
If you watch the following movie and….
…you don’t know what you are watching. You are too old.
…you don’t understand why the resolution is too low. You are too young.
…you remember when you have played the game you are watching. You know how old I am 
Once upon a time there were many different kind of games like in this short movie. All games run on a very limited hardware. In contrast to that hardware we have now unlimited ressources but only a few types of games. I hope the guys of the Games Convention know this too and bring back some more variety instead of the reincarnation of the last year games with better graphic effects…
For this year I have planned to finish a runnable version of my long time ago planned little RPG game. So far it was a great experience in discover so many different technologies and test them and play around with them.
Now, I have found everything (at least I believe) which can be put together to that what I want to achieve. In the first step I will implement the basic game server which handles a simple protocol to communicate with the clients and store the game data into a database. In the second there will come a graphical frontend which will be also the editor to setup the realms to play in.
For the server side I will implement everything in Java and use jdbc to connect to a mysql database. For the graphical use client the journey brought me to Irrlicht. A slim and fast 3D engine which is available for many plattforms with good support.
The story continous… Why I should start a simple hobby? It would not be funny for such a long time.
This evening I have got some time to play a bit with the java binding to irrlicht called jirr. I like java and I like the results I have seen.
After the first experiences using jirr it is really worth to get a deeper impression of it. I am really sure I will write soon more about it.
For testing it by yourself have a look at the Jirr Project of Stefan Dingfelder at sourceforge. Also check the Forum of Irrlicht. There is a category for jirr, too.
For building the irrlicht engine on Kubuntu you need first download the source package from http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/downloads.html and unpack it.
Enter the source/Irrlicht folder inside the new irrlicht folder and start compilation with make.
If you run into trouble with error messages it is because of missing dependencies. Install following packages from the kubuntu repository:
and try again. Now everything should compile fine.
In the examples directory are some directories with examples and corresponding Makefiles. After executing make you will find the results in bin/Linux
If the Linker complains “cannot find -lXext” remove the -lXext in the Makefile from the compile command. Its not nessesary.
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