• Setup
• Asset pipeline
  • Blender setup
  • OGRE Export Settings
  • Materials and Textures
  • Converting .mesh.xml to .mesh
• Terms

#+TITLE:GameLib

GameLib is my library for making games. It is the successor to base2.0.

GameLib is written in Cakelisp.

Setup

Clone the repository and its dependencies:

git clone https://macoy.me/code/macoy/gamelib.git
git submodule update --init --recursive
hg clone http://hg.libsdl.org/SDL Dependencies/SDL

Build dependencies:

./BuildDependencies_Debug.sh

Build:

./Build_Debug.sh

Asset pipeline

This is a work in progress.

Blender setup

• Install Blender. I can confirm Blender 2.91 works.

• Copy blender2ogre to Blender plugins:

cp -r Dependencies/blender2ogre/io_ogre/ ~/.config/blender/2.91/

• Open Blender, then open Preferences (Edit->Preferences), and click Add-ons

• Search for "Ogre" and check the box to enable the OGRE Exporter

• Build Ogre, if you haven't already (run BuildDependencies_Debug.sh)

• Set OGRETOOLS_XML_CONVERTER to where you built OgreMeshTool. You'll need to browse to gamelib/Dependencies/ogre-next/build/Debug/bin/OgreMeshTool_d

You are now ready to export. Open your model or create one, then do File -> Export -> Ogre3D. See the following section for settings. Note: I will be making command-line driven auto-exporting to reduce these manual steps.

OGRE Export Settings

• Don't export materials. These are v1 materials as far as I know, which don't work with Ogre 2

• Don't export scene. I don't use these files

• Ensure mesh export version is set to v2

Materials and Textures

The blender2ogre plugin doesn't do much to help with Ogre v2 materials.

For a textured mesh:

• UV unwrap mesh

• Create new image for texturing

• Add a new material and set the diffuse input to your new image. Name the material what you'd like it to be called in the game as well

• Paint the texture as desired

• In the Image Editor window, do Image -> Save As and save the image to a lossless format (I used PNG)

• Run the following to convert the image to .dds (which will be a larger file, but will load drastically faster):

    convert assets/MyTexture.png data/Materials/Textures/MyTexture.dds

• Export the mesh. Because export materials doesn't do us any good yet, we only export the mesh to get the updated UV coordinates and material (name only)

• Create a .material text file like below:

    hlms MyMaterial pbs
    {
        roughness	0.4
        fresnel		1.33
  
        diffuse_map		MyTexture.dds
        // normal_map		Rocks_Normal.tga
        // roughness_map	Rocks_Spec.tga
        // specular_map	Rocks_Diffuse.tga
    }

• Finally, add the material to the Ogre::Item:

   item->setDatablock("MyMaterial");

  This is only necessary if the mesh didn't already have the Material name set.

Converting .mesh.xml to .mesh

You shouldn't need to do this step if you set OGRETOOLS_XML_CONVERTER, but in case blender2ogre didn't recognize it, here's how I worked around it:

cd Dependencies/ogre-next/build/Debug/bin
./OgreMeshTool_d -e -O puqs ../../../../../test/data/Models/Suzanne.mesh.xml

Run this after you've made an attempted export from the Blender OGRE plugin.

Terms

GameLib is copyright (C) 2020 Macoy Madson <macoy@macoy.me>.

Licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.

Contact macoy@macoy.me if you would like to negotiate an exception for your use-case.