OGRE integration

Well, I’m beginning to integrate OGRE, and lemme tell you… it’s growing on me. I also find that it can actually be quite slim when you leave out the utility components and do most things yourself. I just want it’s fantastic material system. I’m beginning to figure out just how unbelievably moddable this can make the game as well. In addition to loading an Actor file for every ship, that actor file will reference an OGRE material and mesh file, which is also fully moddable. I’ve also mastered the material abstraction system. For example, you can create a base class material called ship_material that implements normal mapping and paralax mapping over a main texture with all textures referenced by alias, then extend it with set_texture_alias on each ship, so none of that fancy shit has to be replicated, just say which textures to use and reference the .mesh in the Actor file. bam! I love modularity.

Continuum Engine

That’s the name I have for it now.  It’s a badass name, no?

Anyway, I’ve got 3demon engine working as a rendering engine for now, but I still hate the Irrlicht style shadows it uses.  It IS a branch of Irrlicht.  They’re just so… broken.  They don’t even have a consistent appearance across subsystems.  OpenGL has a different volume method from D3D9 in it.  I want something like OGRE, but I absolutely hate the way it’s organized.

Does anyone have an idea as to what I should do?  I don’t want to use my own rendering engine because I’d like the focus of this project to be on the game itself this time, not every little technical thing to support it.  I will give OGRE a shot, and if that’s how it has to be, so be it.  But do you absolutely HAVE to use the ReferenceApp layer?  That, I put to you, is TERRIBLE API design.