Game Engines - Week 2 - Frustration

So this second week of my game engine blogs, I am proud to say that I’ve officially completed my first easy question which now leaves me with 5 EXP… I’m pretty sure I still won’t finish on time for the midterm because these easy questions are providing me with a huge challenge, and the values of them depreciate after each one I complete, meaning in order to write the midterm I would have to complete… a lot, and they’re due next week! Doesn’t help that I have my 4^th year AI assignments as well… The midterms are scheduled on both days and I am very concerned that they are back to back. The assignment that I completed was the first assignment. I know in my previous blog I posted my creation of the solar system with the textured spheres for the third homework assignment, but upon creating this I thought of a very simple way to complete the first assignment and was able to submit that to the TA last Friday.

Currently I am trying to figure out how to complete both the sky dome question, and I have started creating the robotic arm with A LOT of difficulty… I understand this is a programming course, but I’m not too sure why it’s catered to strong programmers, and does not provide enough assistance or help to the weaker ones. On paper, the mathematical aspects that we have been learning in class such as the matrices and all the linear algebra stuff is bringing back a lot of memories of my first year, back when they didn’t really teach much game development associated things… I am at a huuuuge disadvantage, but I did retain most of this mathematical knowledge, so if I do get to write the midterm things won’t be as bad as I think.

My current issue with the sky dome program is that I am quite unsure how to add the animating texture without the pinch factor. By attaching a texture onto a sphere, it creates a pinch at the top and bottom of the sphere, and ever by animation it looks very strange. I was reading online that there was actually a simpler way of creating this in Ogre, but the online help that I’ve been trying to seek REALLY has not been helping me out at all. It’s been giving me ideas that I’ve been trying to implement but I’ve honestly been having no luck with this at all. It’s all so frustrating. I haven’t updated my repository with it yet because I don’t really know what I’m doing at this point… We’ll see what happens... I’m holding off on the solar system assignment as of now because it’s one that can be upgraded and I’m not too sure how that works yet.