Newbie Tutorial 1         An Ogre is Born
note This tutorial is a disorganised (and out of date) mess - go back. wink

Ogre Newbie's Tutorial 1

An Ogre is Born

So, you want to use OGRE. You have made a wise decision. These 10 lessons will teach you how to get started using this fabulous engine, from download to eye-candy.

This tutorial assumes that you wish to build the OGRE engine yourself from the latest source code instead of using the most recently released SDK. See Installing An SDK - Shoggoth or Building From Source - Shoggoth for more on each of these options.

Requirements for Lesson 1:

  1. Compiler
    • I am going to assume you are using Microsoft Visual C++.NET 2003, I may release a later supplementary 1b tutorial with steps for alternate development environments, but for now, I am going to assume VC.NET 2k3
  2. Tortoise CVS Client for
  3. OGRE Win32 Visual C++ Dependencies
  4. DirectX SDK 9.0(a,b,c)
    • If you want DirectX, you need to download and install the DX sdk, isn’t too hard, just large
    • Time, a few cold beverages, some food, and enthusiasm


Ok, now onto the good stuff.

Part 1: Getting OGRE

Getting OGRE is a simple process of pulling the latest development snapshot from the SourceForge CVS Server. I will walk you through installing and setting up Tortoise CVS to do OGRE pulls from the Windows Explorer window.

First off, you need to download Turtoise CVS. Click the link above and download from one of Sourceforge (from now on referred to as SF) servers.

Once that’s downloaded, run the setup, the setup should be very straight forward, just use the default values it give you (assuming you want it to be in English). Once Turtoise CVS is done installing, you need to restart your computer to get the explorer integration to work. Do so, and crack open a soda.

After you open the Explorer window, create a new folder, lets call it "Ogre_Tutorials"

Simple as pie, navigate to that folder, and right click, on the context menu that pops up there should be a little green arrow with CVS Checkout next to it, click it.

Reboot your machine now.

Ok, so now that we’re all happy, rebooted, and refreshed, its time to get OGRE from CVS. Open an Explorer Window (Windows Key (WK) + E)
When you click it, a spiffy dialog should pop up with values to enter. Ignore the top most text box (CVSROOT) and input the following values into the boxes

Protocol: Password Server
 Server: cvs.ogre3d.org
 Port: <leave empty>
 Repository Folder: /cvsroot/ogre
 User name: anonymous
 Module: ogrenew

Click OK, a box should pop up like this: http://centaurforce.sourceforge.net/Ogre_Tutorials/Ogre_Newbie1_files/image005.gif

Once this box pops up, and the green text starts flowing, you know that your checkout is going correctly. If it doesn’t show up like this, make sure you’ve entered all the parameters in the previous window correctly. At the end, it should say Success, CVS operation completed

Awesome, you know have the latest and greatest version of OGRE on your system, time to set up your development environment.

Part 2: Building Ogre

This is by far the longest and most frustrating part about using OGRE. Compiling takes a while, at least an hour and a half to do everything on my computer.
Once your setup is right however, it shouldn’t need any more modifications to build the next time.

Open up Visual C++.NET 2003, and open the Ogre.sln file in “C:\Ogre_Tutorials\ogrenew\”.

Open up the OGRE 3rd Party Dependency Zip file, and unzip to “C:\Ogre_Tutorials\ogrenew\”

Once it is done extracting, select Build->Batch Build from the top menu. On the batch build menu, press Select All and then press Rebuild

Now just sit back, relax, and wait for Ogre to finish building

If you did everything right, you should get the message everyone dreams of seeing.

http://centaurforce.sourceforge.net/Ogre_Tutorials/Ogre_Newbie1_files/image011.gif

Thats it, now you have a working build of ogre on your machine. You may now proceed to Newbie Tutorial 2.

-- Stephen Eckenrode
 -- Robomaniac
 -- stephen_AT_centaurforce_NOSPAM_.com
 -- If you need to contact me, I'm on irc normally
 -- AIM: sreComp9981 MSN: the_robomaniac@hotmail.com

Alias: Newbie_Tutorial_1