Thanks for your interesting post, which also contains personal information about yourself.
There is a ton of code that I have either A) ported from forum posts or B) rolled my own implementation of functionality already implemented in some plugin/code snippet in Ogre.
You ported C++ code to C# for Mogre?
It would be nice if you share it with our community.
Ogre is great, and the community here is great
I'm also happy about the helpful people here.
It would be awesome to have some sort of automated wrapper
About 4 years ago we has user Marioko from South America as Mogre maintainer.
He started to develop an autowrapper, which also works for add-ons.
Unfortunately his free time decreased and he became inactive.
As I wrote him an e-mail about one year ago, he said now he switched from Windows to Linux. So there is no more motivation for Mogre, because it just runs on Windows.
His autowrapper he never published. Also I don't know it's state. But I'm shure it wasn't finished, because in this case he would had published it.
Most of us are probably one man teams
Yes, most Ogre projects have only one or very few team players. I saw it in the
Ogre survey 2011.
automatically wrap any C++ code into C#/.NET
The tool SWIG does this job. In the past there was OgreDotNet, which was autowrapped by SWIG. Wrapping with SWIG works (in general), but it's bad for Ogre, because it's not very performant.
Mogre is based on cpp2java and I suppose this creates more performant code. Although I don't know how much of Mogre was additionally optimized by hand.
By the way:
User manski looked deeply into the Mogre autowrapping process and created a documentation.
Related links are here:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14817&p=83510#p83510
lack of third party ports of plugins
There are still some interesting ports and wrappers for Ogre add-ons.
Unfortunatelly I saw problems, when the creators leaved. Often other users had problems to update it. Perhaps because it's not easy to understand the code of somebody else?
Documentation is important for software development. It needs time and is not so much fun. But it's good in the long-term view.
So if some of you publish code, it would be fine to add comments to the source code.
Since unity forces you to use PhysX, and PhysX's vehicle stuff is pretty terrible
Unity was never an option for me, but I agree that using Ogre/Mogre offers much freedom of choices. The downside is that you have to do (much) more development at your own.
For my own project it was the totally right choice to use Ogre/Mogre.
I've recently discovered BEPU physics
Nice to know.
Wouldn't it be nice to have official support from the Ogre team for Mogre some day.
In general yes.
But also for this case you need at least one person with the needed knowledge and time for maintaining.
In the case that the Ogre core teams would say
yes - who would do the job?
Suggestion:
It would be very good to
update/publish the MogreSDK with the current 1.7 state.
In my point of view this is an important step, which we shouldn't forget, although we (seems to) focus on Mogre 1.8.
I think the build bundle of user Cygon (1.7.3) could do a good job for this. It's only .NET 4.0, but should be well for many Mogre users.
Other people have at least the choice to try the older (current) MogreSDK or to grabb or build alterternative Mogre binaries.
Our benifit:
When somebody gives Mogre a try, he shouldn't be frustrated in the first our.
He should grabb the MogreSDK (with latest 1.7 binaries), which also contains samples.
User amirabiri refreshed all Basic Mogre Tutorials and wrote a new and good Tutorial Framework. So it's a good starting point.
If new users have a good first impression of Mogre, they are more motivated to use it. Perhaps later they develop and share improvements.
If new users are frustrated in the first our (because of bad SDK/binary support) or they don't just touch it (because it looks outdated), then we have bad chances to find new community members.
More on functional programming than anything else but still some interesting stuff around languages, performance, and game-centric issues.
Looks interesting. I pushed it to my printer and read it when I go by train.
But for today I will go to bed. I wanted to go one our ago, but reading/replying to this topic tooks longer.
See you later my friends