Made some more progress with Ogre.

While looking through the samples that come with Ogre, I noticed that all of them tend to create scenes in C++ code (mSceneManager.AddSceneNode, AddChild, and so on and so forth). While this might be well and good for the demo, this is no way of creating levels, so I set out to find a decent scene editor for Ogre. Couldn’t find one that’s half decent and doesn’t require you to download the 1.5 GB Qt SDK in order to compile with VS 2010 (yes, Ogitor, I’m talking about you).

And then I found out about DotScene.

Turns out, the reason demos hardcode the scene into their code is because Ogre doesn’t officially support any scene editing! They provide a SceneManager class, and it’s up to the programmer to find/make a suitable solution for his/her scene-editing needs.

Time and again, Ogre continues to astound me. There are a bunch of projects that aim for the stars and then fall flat on their ass just because they tried to add too many features and couldn’t support all of them. Ogre neatly sidesteps this problem by defining its own boundaries and rigidly sticking to them. It’s… humbling, the vision of the creators of Ogre.

Anyhow, obtained the “New DotScene Loader” (highly imaginative name, right? This is right up there with Reddit’s codebase having a base DB model named “thing”) from the wiki and integrated it into my codebase, should now be able to successfully create scenes from a .scene file. I say should because the code compiles, but I haven’t bothered to actually test it out yet with a .scene. And why is that? Because it’s time for a break.