MV3D Development Blog

I was able to speed up the Noise generator by caching the pseudo random numbers. It seems like random.seed() is very slow, and I was calling it about a billion times. Anyway, the whole thing is 10x to 100x faster now. Not quite fast enough for generating a 2d noise image every frame, but usable now.

I got the server application to run on Windows. You don’t get the ability to use a database (though I suppose if I were to install MySQL and its Python bindings, it would probably work on windows.) I also have some Windows screen shots (the water is actually blue!). These detail my playing around with the in game editor:

A cube and a few robots floating in water:

And my favorite– a picture of a fish:

Things were very stable, and therefore, I updated the alpha server and made up a Windows client build for all the testers.

Why am I frustrated, you may ask? In my last post (or the one before?) I mentioned that I figured out how to do bounding boxes for objects. Yes, it’s true, I did, and it was going to be splendidly easy… if the PyOgre folks had remembered to wrap the OgreWireBoundingBox class, which they hadn’t. After giving up on that, one of the next things I needed to do is to have some way of quickly modifying or creating textures in Ogre. I’ll be creating a sort of paint program so you can modify the placement of various textures on the terrain (rock vs dirt vs road). To do that, I need to display the image you are painting to (duh), and for that, it needs to be made into a texture in Ogre. Digging through the PyOgre code, PyOgre wiki and forum, I came up with some code that may be able to give me access directly. It even almost worked. Unfortunately, in the most recent Windows release of PyOgre, the code is not wrapped. Ok, fine, since it was on Linux, I should be able to manually build a newer version of PyOgre. Nope. Many errors resulted. Ok, try it in VC++. Same result. After digging around on the forum, I found this post by the creator of PyOgre. So this means, no more PyOgre updates (there haven’t been any in months anyway). He mentions Python-Ogre, which I have been ignoring even though they’ve been stealing the PyOgre forum a lot lately. Basically, my only option at this point is a) maintain PyOgre myself (while I do have a good amount of experience with SWIG, I am not good ad building code on Windows), or b) switch to Python-Ogre. Looks like it’s option B. They claim that you only have to make a few adjustments. We’ll see. I was finally able to get PythonOgre running its demos in Windows this morning after quite a few hours of annoyances. We’ll see how hard it is to make it work in Linux. Though, before going through that trouble, I will be learning enough of Py++ to determine if WireBoundingBox is wrapped (it should be since Py++ wraps everything supposedly), and if the texture related stuff will work at all.

I may still have to write my own little Python extension.. Something like:

char *Convert(void *a) {return (char*)a;};

Unless Py++ is friendlier than SWIG when it comes to pointers. It’d probably be good to do something simple like that as a basis for other C++ Python extensions I’ll have to write later (for the purpose of speeding things up), but once again, while this may be simple on Linux, I still hate building things on Windows. Maybe VC++ will make it easier, I don’t know.