Clay and the Ogre Community,

Not sure if this belongs here or in a Forum, but here are my comments / thoughts / difficulties on working thru this tutorial. Note, that many are due to my own stupidity, but indicate problems other may run into. A quick search on the forum did seem to indicate this much trouble, but I did not go back too far.

Comments on installing / reading the documentation when trying to get Basic Tutorial 1 working:

• The documentation does not indicate where plugins.cfg is. Finally did a serach and found 6 copies on the distribution (building from src). Perhaps a new directory called Configuration should exist where you keep this. In general, the dll's are all over the place and I assume multiple copies of the same thing.

• Can the Plugins.cfg file use the environment variables $(OGRE_SRC) or $(OGRE_HOME)?

• The 3rd party Wizards are nice, but what is the SDK wizard? Needs better documentation. Should it copy over the Plugins.cfg and resource.cfg files?

• zlib1.dll is not found and is not in the Dependencies download. Only the .lib files are included and no zlib.lib file either, only a zlib.h file. This is a biggy since zlib is such a pain in the $&^^%&* IMHO. I ended up finding one and copying to my local project bin directory.

• I get an exception in DynLib:Load due to OgrePlatform_d.dll can not be found. Copying the executable over to the Samples/Common/bin/Debug. The plugins.cfg file just does not seem to work. It would be helpful if it printed out the environment in the Log file. I have tried both absolute and relative paths. OK.I thought this was due to a slash (/) rather than a backslash (\). Again, a configuration for Basic Tutorial for both Windows and Linux would be appreciated. Students will have a lot of difficulty in this. Experienced programmers like me take two hours more than it should. Probably could have got it done faster without the Tutorial 😑. It turns out this needs to be copied over to the local directory as well.

• The config files in ReferenceApplication are wrong. There seems to have been a new directory structure added under Media and these do not reflect it.

• The Basic Tutorial 1 web page indicates that the "robot.mesh" was preloaded by the -ExampleApplication class. This seems to be false, and again probably something that should have been in the resources.cfg file. The tutorial needs to be updated to clarify this. At the end it does indicate that you need to add some FileSystem settings. There is an error here, in that it references materials/models which does not exist. Fixing that still gives an error that robot.mesh is missing. Really, the plugins.cfg and the resource.cfg are *the* key building blocks of the simple application and a page or two should be spent on the format and explaining the processing of these. I will try to work on that.

• At this point, an exception is thrown about "robot.mesh" and I basically decide I can not proceed directly. I am going to scour the API documents to get a feel for the createEntity, etc. before proceeding. OK. That did not help, It says it will be loaded. How does it know where to search? I am assuming that info is in the FileSystem. AArrrrggghhhh!!!

• Oh, one problem, I had to comment out the line "#Plugin=Plugin_FileSystem" from the plugins.cfg file, as that was not built from the source. Going back to look at the build. Also had to comment out the Direct3D8 stuff. Looking at the Demo_SkeletalAnimation files it seems like it should work. Found the problem: During the cutting and pasting I ended up with == rather than =. Dooh!!! I can now see the robot - yippie!!!

• FYI, one of the resource.cfg files references knot.zip which does not exist.

• The post on this thread is a bad link.

• The page to Log-in or create a new account does not have a way to create a new account, hence I can not post this in the (empty) discussion for the page.

Thanks for the input. I've updated the tutorial based on some of these suggestions. Most of the rest of this is not related to this first tutorial and should probably be posted to the forums. Thanks. -Clay

Troubleshooting

I believe the troubleshooting section belongs at the far end of the article. It is kind of disrupting when everything is going fine to be interrupted by a long section of troubleshooting which you have to scroll through carefully making sure you dont miss the next section. I think it should be at the end and with different formatting (perhaps inside a special box or something). --Jubei 00:34, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

You're probably right, jubei... --Spacegaier 15:21, 10 March 2009