About Ogre's tools

[NeLo]

The best way to make maps (scenes) is using the 3dssceneexporter MAX plugin and the dotsceneoctree plugin to render it?

I want to do a little RPG demo, and I need to make a small village with a few NPCs with attacheds scripts for behavior.

I can do it with these plugins?

Thaks!

[Baldrake]

That's one way to do it. The other would be to use the Terrain scene manager and place the buildings and NPC manually (at runtime) within your application.

Note that Ogre is purely a 3d rendering engine, it has no support whatsoever for building an RPG (like dialogue trees, quests, etc.)

[Chris Jones]

im using dotScene in my game. in each level, objects will have their own properties set, and i will have a custom loader to load my own specific properties. im also having a level properties object placed in the scene, which will never be drawn (or even added as an entity), but will have loads of properties attached to it, for example, map name, map description, weather conditions, anything thats specific to the level.

im doing this, cos i dont want to have an extra file with information about the level in it

i think this way, u can have specify anything u want to about your game, so in your case, u can attach a property about loading a certain script for a certain object

altho you will have to make/extend the dotScene loader

[NeLo]

Thanks Chris, I'm gonna do it!

Where specify the object properties?

I've think write it in the User Defined object properties. There MAX let write a text. I'm will invent a sintaxis to define my properties, and when exports, export these text also. When load the scene, I will interpret these text.

What do yo think?

Thanks!!!

EDIT: Another possibility is, as you said, write the properties in another file, and load it separately after the scne load. The advantage of this system is that I can modify or fix a property without load MAX.

[Chris Jones]

ah, u mean like write small peices of code, in the objects properties?
like

Code: Select all

LoadScript("ScriptName")

yea?

thats a really good idea, i might incorporate that into mine, thanks

im not sure about MAX, i use blender and u put the properties in blenders logic properties.
the text that you can add (in blender) has a limit of 125 characters tho, not sure if MAX has this same limit

if it does, mab the property names, could be similar, but with a number etc after it, for example, "Code1", "Code2" etc, then you could add as many properties as you want, and just parse all of them the same way?

or, as you said with having another file, could you just use ogres config file class, then you wouldnt have to make your own loader etc

[NeLo]

ah, u mean like write small peices of code, in the objects properties?
like

Code: Select all

LoadScript("ScriptName")

yea?

This is an example of specifications for a NPC enemy:

Code: Select all

Current_Weapon=Dagger
Life=50
Speech=Knight_in_the_Forest.speech

or, as you said with having another file, could you just use ogres config file class, then you wouldnt have to make your own loader etc

I'm going to take this way. In MAX will specify a name for an entity, and in another file like entity_name.ent I will write the parameters for the entity, including his speech file.

I think that this is a good way.

Greetings!

[Chris Jones]

ah right, that seems like a good way of doing things, i might try to implement something like that when i get to that part, im currently making my own portal scene manager, so will be a while yet

[NeLo]

Wow... I can't get the 3ds scene export and the dotscene plugin for Ogre.

Where is the binaries?

In the download and Add-On sections doesn't is.

I have the 9th life source, and both are there, but I guess that are old releases.

[NeLo]

Finally I can download the source from the CVS. It was hard for me

[Franky]

the 9th life scene manager system was a bit dodgy. back then we never got the export to work with the dotscene plugin. so we just manualy parsed the xml file with TinyXML and made a naming convention with the objects in max. that made the whole thing quite flexible tho, and we even used that to set position to pretty much everything. you can basically make a sphere in 3dmax and call it with a specific name and when you parse, you just extract the position of the sphere but do not load it (or maybe we load it and then delete it, i can't remember) and can use that for path finding nodes, spawn point, character position start, etc. it gives you a way to visualy set position instead of do a set position with some specific values and then having to change it 20 times because its not exactly right.