Creating a scene - how would you do it?

Hoohoo!

I've been reading through the OGRE Forum for all afternoon now trying to find a good way to create my scene.
So many half complete tuts. So many alpha versions. So many possibilities. (Sometimes I think, the OGRE project needs a caretaker to get rid of all those outdated pages... so one doesn't need to question himself if the mentioned solution would still run with the current ogre version or whether if can be done by far easier by now.)

So... a bit frustrated... I'd like to ask someone more experienced now how he would do it.

The application would be a big 3D Aquarium in the end.
Fishes.
Ground.
Stuff on the ground.
Fishes preferably not swimming in ground and stuff.

---

How should i organize it?
Thought about using this Paging Scene Manager being able to load only the necessary highly detailed ground tiles.

But how to tie this again with a physical representation of it in NXOgre?
Load the complete ground into NXOgre?
Just read that more than 100 vertices wouldn't be to good for even convex meshes. Uhm...

What about ... animated grass on the ground? Would I need to put it in all by hand?

No, of course I don't ask for a complete implementation or anything.
Just the way you would do it and maybe even more importantly which tools /add-ins you would use to build the scene (using 3d max and oFusion at the moment) as I'm rather clueless at the moment.

There's probably no generic out of the box solution for this because everyone expects/need different things. I think, a the start, you have to know precisely what you are going to need - and then choose the best way of doing it. Yes, I know that this doesn't answer your question, but just think about it - maybe you can combine some existing stuff, like visual scene representation formats .osm or .scene... If you don't need to much physics and doing something simple, maybe you can even hard-code it? Or maybe a simple file format of your own will do the job? Or use nxogre scene serialization... The answer is out there, trust me

I don't even see any need for NxOgre in that sort of application. I assume the fishes would move by buoyancy and fluid dynamics (which in general is quite hard to do, and not a feature of PhysX). If your just going to use it for collision it seems a little overkill when you could just use opcode.

Hm. I haven't used Opcode till now.
For the simulation I simply set gravity to zero ...
To let the fishes swim I give them random torques and forces. Works quite well for me.
Though not too well optimised yet... I didn't spend any time on finding the best parameters.

Apart of that I'm tired of putting together a new setup for every Ogre project I do. I'd like to have something a bit ... more longlasting.

Hmm... I'll try to make this paging scene manager + GOOF (because of its editor) to run today. Maybe there's a way to pass things to NxOgre's Scene Loader from there.


Still the question ... is it possible to simply load the 6.000+ polygon ground as a static in NXOgre?


.

Probably not. It's best to optimise it, to a 1000 say?

Okay... I'll keep them in mind.

I already thought that a second mesh for the ground's collision model would be of need. 1.000 polys sound good for that.