Milestone 1: Reached

After waking up and getting myself stocked up on groceries, I sat down and read some OGRE tutorials. I wanted to approach this project with the right mind set and that was to know exactly what I'm doing before I try anything. I read through about 4 beginner tutorials which was a refresher since I've used OGRE before.

After reading those, I explored my options with a terrain configuration file and thought about how I would create the terrain. I used a heightmap with a base texture as well as a detail texture. These are not mine. I will replace them with more appropriate textures when I get a chance to do the artwork for this project. But, I do have a custom material that has 3 layers on it (base, detail, grid) which you can see in the picture. That wasn't terribly painful what so ever. I haven't figured out how to get access to the geometric data which I will require for path planning but I will look into this. Worst case scenario is I manually load the heightmap myself and create auxilary storage.

I also wanted to know what my card is capable of in terms of pure polygons and, as you can see from the shot, there are 200 models plus the detailed terrain. The LOD on the terrain is high because it's using large tiles so they won't go down in detail for a while. It is very easy to load up meshes through OGRE which is a nice feature. I have to look into converting a Quake 2 model into OGREs native '.mesh' format which may or may not require me writing it. If it does, I will release it to the public if it's actually usuable.

This was the first thing I wanted to get done. I wanted to be able to load terrain and move around and because OGRE is very user friendly, this took me about 30 minutes of reading and coding. Off to a good start.

Screenshot Details: 1280*1024 - 32bit - Default ATI driver settings (fairly high texture quality)