Hack Week: OGRE.NET Packaging

Last week was my second Hack Week at Novell. Massi and I had been intending to hack on a demo for embedding Mono in games, but realised that the overhead of bootstrapping a stable working environment would most likely frustrate our efforts to get something within the week.

Instead, I decided to package some game libraries for Mono on the openSUSE Build Service. I planned to package Axiom, OpenTK and OGRE.NET, and write some MonoDevelop templates for them, but got rather tied up in the details of packaging OGRE.NET and its unmanaged dependencies (I now know far more about packaging SONAMEd libraries than I wanted to!). As a result, I only completed the packaging for OGRE.NET, though I will get around to packaging the others sometime.

You can now install my OGRE.NET and OGRE packages for OpenSUSE 11, reference OgreDotNet and Math3D from MonoDevelop, and start writing code without having to worry about unmanaged libraries, etc.:

Screenshot of a
MonoDevelop running an OGRE.NET demo

Massi did an alternate Mono game embedding demo, and investigated how we could optimise SWIG (or some other binding generator such as DoxyBind) to generate better Mono bindings for C++ code.