questions

Deg

27-05-2010 13:32:40

Hello,

This python wrapper looks very interesting and i would love to dive in to it. Before i do though i have a few questions if you don't mind me asking.

1) Is there one person doing this whole wrapper? Or are there more members active?
2) I see quite low user activity in the forum/google group; is there still an active user community?
3) I guess what i want to know most; if i manage to make something somewhere 3-4 years down the road, will python-ogre still be there?

I hope i don't sound negative, i am amazed by the excellent job done here. It's just that a stable engine and active community are essential to me in long term development.

thanks in advance,
Deg

andy

01-06-2010 10:38:10

Thanks for the interest and sorry for the delay in responding (real life is a tad busy:))

The project is still very active, however as it's reasonably mature the activity on the forums has certainly dropped over the last 18 months however we typically get 500- 1000 downloads of the windows binaries for each release so there's a good user community (plus the Linux and Mac users)..

I am the primary developer however as most of what happens is based upon Py++ (the wrapper generator) and Boost-Python, there is a much larger virtual team -- plus there have been 5-10 regular contributors to the code base over time...

I would expect to see the project alive and well for many years yet :)

Regards
Andy

Deg

01-06-2010 21:08:27

Thank you for your answers, it's all well besides a slow moving forum. I take it is normal to ask most ogre related questions on the main boards and i see responsiveness is pretty good there. I am still comparing and i have besides ogre two commercial engines left; shiva and torque. I am mainly interested in them for the documentation, opensource docs are usually not the best.

Torque has a lot of extra's that you can buy when you need them. At first it looks good, i rather buy a good test driven bit of middleware then spending a week or two behind the keyboard and on the forums trying to figure it out myself. Reinventing the wheel isn't my favorite pastime. Anyway it does seem to have an awful lot as add-on even down to a code editor, apparently the one they deliver themselves is crap. The engine can double it's price if you buy all the adds. One even costs half the engine price by itself! The feeling it gives me is they are draining as much cash out of it as possible.

Shiva seems the be a one thing deal, just buy it and everything is included. If everything that they include comes close to what torque has remains to be seen, im still comparing. The learning edition is also a pretty strong show of faith in your own product. No need to fork over cash just to get started. I like companies that do that a lot.

Anyway does anyone of you 3D coding heroes have some input on the above? Any obvious differences as speed or features?

regards,
Deg

andy

03-06-2010 05:29:23

It depends of course entirely on your own personal opinion and requirements :)

If you want to program in Python then (IMHO :)) nothing can touch Python-Ogre -- of course if you want something simpler (and not as feature rich) the Panda3D project is a great alternative

If you want to program in C++ etc and want a toolkit then I'd look at NeoAxis -- it's a very usable bundle and based on Ogre3D

Don't know much about the others :)

Andy

Deg

03-06-2010 23:53:18

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions Andy, it is much appreciated. NeoAxis sure looks good, they have put a lot of time in it. The reason why i dismissed it is because of the dotnet framework. The thought of having to rely on a huge pile of closed source middleware scares me ;)

Anyway i looked a bit deeper at ogre and it is amazing how many plugins and other projects are going on here. It looks like everything i could possibly want to use has been made or is in the works already. The challenge is to find the ones that i want to use and fit them in somehow. I might even be needing Py++ :) But first things first, I'll have a go at the tutorials :)

Gurrier

05-06-2010 11:03:50

My experience with Torque3D is that it isn't that great. Some of the source code is just written badly + you need to pay for an engine to try it out. If you download the the source on a warez site and try it you have 0 up to date documentation and no access to the forum. Which made a school project of mine a living hell...

From all the engines I used ogre is by far the most usable. Doesn't matter for what you need it it will work.The only downside... it's a render engine so no fancy prebuild stuff like a world editor. But since it is an opensource engine it has a large community and has a lot of extra and free plug-ins.
Then again if you want to make a game asap go for a fully equiped game engine. But it will cost you.

The forum activity of Python-Ogre isn't that great but I think that most of us just look at the main ogre forum for stuff. Since C++ and python are so much alike it isn't hard to rewrite c+++ to python. Except if they begin casting stuff.

cxxD

06-06-2010 21:29:21

I'm new to ogre as well and it takes a little time to get into it (this is what is think but I'm a coding noob). but try it out, give it a chance. it's got a great community, a lot of knowledge is packed in the forums and the wiki. but the problem with the plug-ins is: some of them aren't documented that well as you'd like to see. these are just my opinions. I was really surprised by what i could do with this engine and i think you can do a thousand times better than me.

Deg

10-06-2010 20:55:53

thank you all for your help and advice. I dived into the tutorials and bounced straight back out again into a vector math tutorial (http://chortle.ccsu.edu/VectorLessons/vectorIndex.html) It's a shame i can't get stuff to move around the screen just yet but it seemed pointless working through tutorials without understanding what is going on in the background. I'm starting to understand the dot product and all that now so i can try again soon i hope :)

Deg

25-06-2010 14:28:59

Update!

After i brushed up my vector math skills and that took a while! ;) I started using python-ogre again. After the tutorials i ended up in a black hole however. I find it very hard to learn ogre while constantly having to look up c++ api references and trying to find examples of it ect ect. I ended up trying the c++ version making far better progress in it. Using visual studio combined with visual assist x gives me so much more speed that i started to wonder how others use python-ogre. Is it purely used by ogre experts? I can understand that once you mastered the engine, working in python accelerates things. For a newbie like me however it seems that the best way to learn ogre is by using the c++ version. Anyone any thoughts on the matter?

cheers,
Deg

cxxD

25-06-2010 17:45:03

yeah... are there any shortcuts (because i think that i develop really slow here)