The Ogre 3D engine is an open source graphics engine written in C++. While Ogre 3D is not a game engine, it is designed to work with a range of other game engine components and it sports an impressive amount of well tuned features for game development. Some commercial games, such as Torchlight have been written with and on top of Ogre 3D.

In our course the reasons to get into Ogre 3D include:

• Get to know a complex but well architectured system that is used in game development
• Get to know the fundamentals of higher-level graphics techniques for games (e.g. scene management, animation)
• Have a core C++ framework to build on for the final project

In this first lab, your goal is to get your first Ogre application running and then experiment with developing a simple scene. The Ogre Wiki is full of great resources, including really good tutorials. We will make extensive use of these tutorials go get up-to-speed, so during this first Ogre week, your assignment is:

• To complete the steps for building an Ogre app from scratch
• To complete the Basic Tutorial 1: Introduction to the SceneManager, SceneNode, and Entity objects
• To complete the Basic Tutorial 2: Introduction to Cameras, Lights, and Shadows

The assumption is that you can work on your own machines, so that you can take your development environment with you wherever you go.