Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 6:02 PM |  
I love Ogre3D. :) Without it, I'll be in a lot of trouble by now. Open Source is one of the greatest thing ever happened. You get access to all source code and you get to use other people's contribution. Last but not least, you get to add your own feature if it lacked any. What a win win solution. :)

Right of the bat, we knew we needed Portal to keep our scene rendering to an optimum level. Octree just doesn't cut it for complex scenes. We were really lucky to have someone already doing that for us. Thanks Chaster (Eric Cha)! :)

All was great but we realized all these weren't enough. We needed PSSM shadow if we want our scene to look good and a way to create materials and shaders that has optional features that can be dynamically turned on/off.

I couldn't wait for Ogre's dev team to add PSSM shadow to their system. So I ended up helping them add that feature in the end. :P But I think that's a good thing. :) It's a way to contribute back a little of what I got for free. :)

The material problem was quite the beast to solve though. It took me quite a few iteration before I managed to get them sorta working. I wanted a smart way to generate shaders with given options. But found that it's painfully impossible. In the end, I resorted to shader preprocessing and my own special material template generator. Personally I believe it could be done in a much better way, but what we have right now is a good middle solution. :)

The funny part is that having this solution automated for Yap to easily deal with required me to add support for the blender exporter of Ogre. Doing that made me discover some complications with the exporter that I didn't like. So I made many fixes and changes to it and tried to contribute it back. In the end, I ended up being the maintainer of the blender exporter. lol.
Posted by Lf3T-Hn4D

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