Cameras and Characters

[bigbrainz]

I'm just starting to evaluate porting our game over to the Ogre engine from 3DGS so that we can be compatible with Macs. You can check out our game at http://www.bigbrainz.com if you'd like a sense of what kind of game I'm talking about (there's a free version).

I'd like to hear anyone's opinions regarding how hard it would be to port a game to Ogre--keeping in mind that I'm not a "real" programmer. I taught myself enough C-Script to program pretty handily in 3DGS, but C++ and objects and libraries and stuff may be much harder. I'm also concerned that I can't seem to find any demos with a solid 3rd-person camera or character action.

My game is something of a 3rd-person shooter, albeit for education, and I'm nervous I'd have to program the camera, characters, and AI from scratch. I did have to program quite a bit of AI in 3DGS, but I only had to modify the core camera and character code.

Thanks!

[regress]

wow, those games look simply amazing, I really like the premise.
Educational games have a lot of potential, and this really seems to go where they should.

As far as porting from 3DGS, it does seem like it will be quite a hassle, and a major, major undertaking for something like this.
While you already have the art assets, you'll have to convert them, and create the camera ai, character ai, etc, all in code, unless you use a scripting engine - a la lua, or angelscript.

Anyway, I hope you luck in either path you choose, it's definitely an amazing bit already accomplished.

[nfz]

Glad to see others taking an interest in developing educational games. I tried out the free version and found it very easy to use and fun to play. I am going to get the 7 year old boy I babysit to try it out and will get back to you on his reaction.

As far as using Ogre you have a lot of work to do as regress said. Ogre only does rendering which only covers about 1/5 of the components that you need for a game engine. Going this route means greater flexibility and more control but also a lot more work (development time). Another option is try out Yake or the Zeus engine. Both use Ogre for rendering and bundle together other modules to make a potential game engine.

[nfz]

The 7 year old really liked the game so he is now bugging his parents to get the full version . He did make a comment about the "Monster" that comes out of from behind each door: "They should be different so you want to find out whats behind the door".