Hynds|Studio

From the Blog

Nov

Happy Thanksgiving.

Posted by BrianH at 1:35 pm

Yes, it’s the day before the most insane shopping holiday of the year. A day to eat as much food as you can before hitting the bitter cold streets at 3am tomorrow morning. Preparing to get the first spots in line for cheap products at retail stores for stocking stuffers, also known as the junk they haven’t been able to sell for the past year. The holiday that celebrates a harvest to kick start the shopping sales for a more important holiday, christmas. Can you tell I work in retail? Black Friday lingers in the back of my mind throughout the day as I enjoy my turkey and ham and wonder how I’m going to crawl out of bed tomorrow to be at work at 5:30 am. But spending time with my family is incalculable in value. Thanksgiving is truely a celebration of harvest, a feast of gratitude and thanks. I am truely thankful for everything that has made an impact in my life, especially in recent days when my financial situation has burned the pockets from my pants.

May you all have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Nov

Peeking at Ogre3D

Posted by BrianH at 11:55 pm

So, I was bored today and decided to check out Ogre3D. Being more of an artist then programmer, jumping into this whole world of graphics engines was a little bit confusing at first. First of all, I haven’t touched C++ in ages, and even back then it was merely doing simple arithmetic. So, I downloaded the latest release of Ogre3D from www.ogre3d.org (which was 1.6.0). Being lazy, I decided to take the “Prebuilt SDK” route. Well, everything went great until I tried to compile the sample applications and I got an error “You can’t open the application ‘Application’ because it’s not supported on this architecture.” I assumed the XCode file was setup to build for the Intel architecture, so I checked to make sure but it’s set to build Universal Builds. I poked my head around the forums a bit and found out that the OSX Prebuilt SDK available for download is only for Intel macs.

So now it’s time to stop being lazy. I decided to compile the SDK myself and downloaded the Ogre3D source code for the SDK. However, to save some time in compiling every single dependancy, I found the Universal Binary’s for them instead. I slapped them in every spot on my drive that made any logical sense (i.e. /Library/Frameworks, /System/Library/Frameworks, etc.) and it still wasn’t recognizing the dependancies. By coincidence, I hovered my mouse over one of them and noticed they were pointing to “ogre/Dependencies/…”. Since the directory in the SDK source didn’t even exist, I would have never thought to put it there. To make a long story short, I discovered if the dependency displays in red text in XCode, then it can’t find it. *sigh*.

Now that all the pieces are in the puzzle, I started the long compiling and linking process. Everything seemed to be going well, aside the 160 warnings, until this error occurred:

error: The file “OctreeZone Plugin-Info.plist” does not exist.

The file is clearly there, so I don’t know what XCode is throwing a fit about. So in frustration, I’ve set aside my interest in Ogre for now. I’ll come back to it again some other day.

EDIT (27 November 2008): I’m pretty well known to never give up on something, so I’ve looked into the issue a little further after sleeping on it last night. I found that the OctreeZone plugin is using an absolute path which is set to “/Users/steve/projects/Shoggoth/ogre/Mac/Ogre/./plist/OctreeZone Plugin-Info.plist”. To fix it, it needs changed to “./plist/OctreeZone Plugin-Info.plist”. If you’re looking to change this yourself, you can find the setting by clicking on the OctreeZone plugin under the Target group > Get Info > scroll under the Build tab and you’ll find it listed in there.

Nov

Networking Demo Update

Posted by BrianH at 11:49 pm

Since I’ve been having some nice time off from work lately, I’ve been spending it on getting some of my projects finalized. I’ve taken the mess from my old networking demo and rebuilt it from scratch. So far, I have a working echo server that works seamlessly with my client I built inside the Blender Game Engine. I’m going to add support for tracking user status and maybe even user profiles, but that may be something later down the road. The ultimate intention for this server/client demo is to create a fully working game server. The game server will provide a solid base for creating various types of networked games. I’ll create a nice API for communicating with the server from the Blender client too, so making your own games work with the server will be very easy. The server and the code within the client are all done in python. I’ll post a video of the server in action soon to demonstrate how things are working so far. As far as releasing the code, I have to think about it more on how I’d like to release this to the community. I’ll keep you posted.