[Chicken-hackers] Ogre 3D engine

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> minh thu wrote:
> > Yep, I'm definitly interested in a 3d engine and will help in such a 
> > project.
>
> Ok.  For now, see if you can get http://www.ogre3d.org running and/or 
> built on your system.  Of the options I listed earlier, it definitely 
> looks like the one with the most commercial relevance.  It has some 
> brand name recognition now, is getting used in a few indie titles, 
> looks like it has Maya plugins, etc.

At least on Windows with Visual Studio .NET 2003, I'm getting very 
strong feelings of It Just Works [TM].  Downloaded their prebuilt SDK 
and it works fine.  All of their Samples built, and most of them run 
correctly on my lowly GeForce4 Ti.  Of course building from sources 
could be tougher, but I see no reason to bother to do that right now.  
If I were to use Ogre as an underlying library, I wouldn't even have to 
delve into the sources, for the most part.

So where does Chicken come into this?  There are no fires to put out.  
I'm not used to things that just work.  Where can Chicken be a value add 
over what's already there?

Sure, we could bind Ogre, but that's just busywork that I have no reason 
to do.  Chicken needs to get actually used for something; prove that 
it's worth bothering with.  We would need some kind of a "driving problem."

Thing is, I already have my own driving problem.  My Ocean Mars game.  
And I don't need or particularly want partners working on it.  Also I 
don't need to do it in Chicken.  C++ is fine until I decide it's causing 
too much pain.

I always see people writing "game engine" layers on top of 3D engines.  
I'm not convinced there's a point to that, as opposed to just writing 
your specific game.

Efficient math operators would be useful to me.  That's what I always 
wanted out of Chicken Scheme.  Perhaps we could put Chicken through some 
kind of 3D number crunching demo.  Of course, the question is whether 
Chicken can do a provably good job at it.  If there are no performance 
advantages to Chicken, then people are just going to use Python, Ruby, 
or Lua.  There are already Python and C# / .NET bindings for Ogre.  
Yet-another-scripting-language, by itself, is not a value add.

Maybe Continuations are a benefit somehow.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every