The need for tutorial number 3

Hi everyone,

As a Ogre and OgreBullet newbie I feel there is a need for more OgreBullet tutorials. I'd be happy to start something but I need a little bit of help.

Here's the situation so far; there are two tutorials, the first is a getting started tutorial, installation and what have you. The second is pretty cool, a flat plane and the launching of boxes. From that point on it's a free-for-all, figure out what the OgreBullet demos are doing and try to integrate parts of them with your project. I'm sure that given enough time and effort this probably is enough for experienced Ogre-ites and game programmers to sort out what they need. However, judging by the help requests in this forum from my fellow noobs there's a big jump in understanding required to go from the two tutorials to actually using OgreBullet in a game.

So, as I mentioned there's not much explanation of how OgreBullet actually works in your program. My understanding is that (and I'd like someone to confirm that this is the case please)

1. The goal is to define and add all of your game objects into bullet (characters, terrain etc)

2. At this point you really do lose direct control of all your objects, instead of setting locations you now only affect things like velocity and let bullet sort everything out)

3. The process for adding an object into bullet is to,
a) Figure out what sort and size of physics bounding box is appropriate for the object
b) Decide what sort of object it is (Rigid or Soft)
c) Set it's location in the world along with attributes like mass, friction and other things (what the hell is restitution anyway? yeah, I'll google it up)

4. Then you call stepSimuation at the start of every frame and it all just works.

I haven't found anything that explains these types of things as well as the Ogre basic and intermediate tutorials, equal amounts of code and discussion on the reason the code needs to be like it is.

For example, tutorial 3 could explain the steps necessary to go from the raycasting terrain clamping of intermediate tutorial 2 http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/Intermed ... =Tutorials to using bullet. ie. how to turn the new 1.7 Ogre Terrain into a big collision mesh, then put a collision box around a ninja then make him work around waypoints like intermediate tutorial 1.

As I say, I'm not looking for a total hand-out, I'm willing to start an article page and ask an expert (ahem Fish) to overlook things. As an OgreBullet newbie I'm in a good position to know what us noobs need

Cheers
Al

Tutorials are good for most people.

The basic process you described looks about right. You can think of Restitution as bounciness. The higher the value the more bouncy the object will be. If the value is too high the object can actually gain energy upon contact with another object, resulting in flubber.

I wouldn't consider myself an expert, I've used maybe 10% of bullets potential. I usually tell people to read the OB demo code, dissected some of the Bullet demo code, and read pretty much everything on the Bullet Wiki, oh, and make lot's of mistakes. Mistakes are great tools for learning.

- Fish

I planned to do tutorial 3 but please buy me some time
First I thought that tutorial writing is not a big stuff but it turned out while I was making those two OB tuts that it is really a time consuming work. I won't promise anything but maybe will write something in the following weeks. Although I'm not an expert myself and not sure that those techniques what I'm using are the proper ones..
We will see.

I totally agree that we need another tutorial, coering in a very basic way how to move an animated mesh on a plane. Thats all I and I think the rest of newbies need to get started.