Engines 0.3

So this weekend I completed two more homework questions. I feel like I'm almost getting the hang of adding objects and materials now; almost.

For some reason animated textures just don't work. Ogre supports them (or should) but I have tried numerous things to make it work and it just doesn't want to. It should be as simple as adding one line of code into the material file, but nope. And on top of that it doesn't give you any errors. Not one. All of the files are loaded in fine according to the OgreLog.log file so I have no idea what there is left to do. I gave up on that question.

Speaking of the OgreLog file, it proved quite useful when I first tried to load in materials. It tells you the file paths where it searches for .material and texture files. That made me realize that file paths must be absolute or based on environment variables, otherwise they do not work. You know how Visual Studio accepts paths  such as $(ProjectDir) and $(ConfigurationName)? Well Ogre doesn't let you do that as far as I know (or maybe I'm using the wrong keywords).

.material files are cool. You can do all sorts of things in them (searching for how to fix the animated texture, I found quite a lot of documentation on Ogre material files  http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/manual/manual_14.html#Material-Scripts ). You can call Ogre's shaders, and play around with  culling and alpha blending and much more. The only problem is that a lot of Ogre's documentation is not very "noob friendly", meaning that if you're searching for a specific function, you will find what you need, but if you search for the process of doing something which requires many functions, it will be much harder to find.

It doesn't help that sometimes on the Ogre forum, when someone asks a question - for example, how to make a billboard - all of the replies are "check out the documentation. It's easy" and link you to something that looks like this:

Very easy to use documentation for someone who's never made an Ogre billboard

So yeah, it's not always easy to find what you need, but the internet is vast.Somewhere, if you search hard enough, you will find the spinets of code, or clear explanations you need - http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=LightsCameraAction#Billboards_and_Materials. Don't expect everything to be easy to find.

*****

On an unrelated note, I remembered this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tguqmbaqNPA at 9:21

Catbert: And Alice, you need more time, but that's only because you spend so much time on your hair and makeup in the morning.
Alice: That's a necessity.
Catbert: Only in your mind.
Alice: You mean, I'm beautiful just the way I am?
Catbert: No, I mean, it's a lost cause. You should put that time to better use!

To put this into perspective, I need to wake up over 2 hours before class starts to get ready in the morning. If I didn't spend time doing my hair and makeup I could probably save myself 30-45min. I know it's a waste of time, but I just can't bring myself to not to do those things in the morning - except maybe during crunch. Actually, even when I've pulled all-nighters I sometimes brought along my hair straightener. There are some things I can't compromise on