Game Engines - Week 1 - Starting with Ogre..

I am not normally a programmer, yeah I know we've all taken the courses, but not everyone's great at it. So this semester we have to take this Game Engine course, and I do understand that it is very programming heavy... so I'll probably have a lot of problems and things to talk about here...

Starting from our first tutorial, we were able to install the Ogre3D game engine as a class. A lot of students had a lot of issues but I believe mine is actually working correctly... this is a good sign!!

The tutorial the week after, we actually started by creating a basic program, without the use of Ogre ofcourse, but this was done in order to set up our Repositories which is still VERY confusing to me... I uploaded my repository for the first time on my own, using the program I made on my own.... ofcourse I used the TwoLoc project loader and also recreated what I learned from some of the sample programs that were provided. Alot of the homework questions we received seem to be very hard, especially for someone like myself with a low programming ability. Shockingly enough, I visited office hours with my fellow GDW members, and we clarified a couple things that DID infact help with me getting to the point I am now...

About the program, originally I looked at the third question believing it to be very easy.. but I didn't realize I actually had to strategize which assignments I do because the EXP values decrease and some of the harder ones require me to upgrade my easy question... which in the end does not really help with the increasing of EXP (which I think is very poorly designed for a course like this).

Anyways, I managed to recreate something that looks like our actual solar system! Take a look:

How real does that look? (Mercury and Pluto are very small) I also managed to pull up realistic textures from the internet of the different planets, and yes I know I DID forget one of the planets (Uranus) but I will be adding this in after. I currently need to work on the lighting and getting this to rotate around, I also plan to use this solar system as my medium and easy assignment for the solar system in another project. So the next few days I'm gonna have to figure out how to get the panning of the camera, and the lighting to work... although I'm pretty sure I can fix the lighting today to complete my first EXP project! this will get me one step closer to actually writing the Midterm.