Hello everyone,

I followed the tutorial on the wiki here to get PolyVox setup. I managed to configure, build, and install everything as described. I have a working (Or I assume it is working - I haven't yet been able to test it) Polyvox binary with the CodeBlock project files correctly setup.

I made sure to re-read the OgreSDK configuration multiple times to see if I was missing a step, or doing something wrong. I copy/pasted the extra lines described and put them exactly where told, also multiple times, including the AppWizard script. I have followed the tutorial by the letter the whole way, so I'm not sure what I am doing wrong...

The problem is that when I go to create a new project through the Ogre3dpolyvox Wizard, it asks for the necessary info, I click "Finish", and... I have an empty project. No framework or pre-existing header files like the tutorial says.

I tried Googling this issue, but couldn't find anything. Maybe I just used the wrong keywords. Sorry if this issue has come up before and I missed the thread.

Thank you in advance for any help, and have a great day!

I'm afraid I've not worked with the Ogre AppWizard myself, but is this a PolyVox specific problem? Does the wizard work if you just try to create a standard Ogre project without PolyVox? If so, you could do this and then add PolyVox separately, the same way that you would add any other C++ library (setting paths to headers and .lib).

Thanks for the advice! I must admit, that I'm not particularly experienced with C/C++. Those auto-generated header files would have been really sweet, so I could just get started testing things out.

I am not sure if anything actually "works". I am going to assume it does, because I followed the directions, and everything up until the last steps seems to check out.

Is it possible someone could point me to the files/code which I need to copy into my project, or link, to get the same effect? Though to be honest, I'm a bit worried that if it's not copying over the framework here, there might be some other things missing.

You should probably start by getting a normal Ogre project working without PolyVox, to make sure that your system is set up properly. Make sure you can build an Ogre project, set up a camera, and load/generate a mesh.

Then you can add PolyVox to the mix. this involves telling your compiler where the PolyVox headers and libraries are found, and also telling it the name of the library to link against. The exact methods for doing this will vary between systems and I've never used CodeBlocks, but there must be some kind of 'Project Properties' you can configure. The compiled PolyVox library is called PolyVoxCore.dll in Visual Studio, but CodeBlocks might call it something like 'libPolyVoxCore'.

Be aware that you need pretty strong C++/graphics knowledge to use PolyVox effectively, but we'll try to help where we can.

Well, it seems the plain vanilla Ogre wizard is broken too. Perhaps the same issue is causing my problems with the OgrePolyvox wizard?

When I run the Ogre wizard, it asks me to direct it to the Ogre SDK folder. I tell it I have an installed package (as opposed to source) and direct it to the folder I have the extracted SDK. When I click next, it says "The path you entered seems valid, but this wizard can't locate OGRE's files in it..."

This is definitely the Ogre mingw package, and it's the top-level directory. I can see the bin and lib folders inside the directory I am selecting. Why does the wizard not recognize the SDK?

I'd also like to note that the OGREPolyvox wizard does NOT ask me to locate the OGRE SDK like the vanilla OGRE wizard does, but perhaps this is normal. I don't know.

Thanks for the continued guidance!

I think you'll be better off asking about this in the Ogre forums, as not everyone here uses Ogre (and those that do may not use the wizard).

Our wiki page has a section on using the 'Ogre3D Only Wizard' (i.e. without PolyVox) and it seems to require the user to make a lot of changes. This seems strange to me - is the wizard not up to date with the latest version of Ogre?

Actually, after a bit of searching I now see that theAppWizard in BitBucket hasn't been updated for two years. And at the end of this thread you can see that someone has made a ZIP file with a newer version.

Maybe you find something useful in those links, or perhaps you should just set up your application manually without using the AppWizard?

Thank you. I was actually going to ask if there were any alternative methods of doing this. I thought OGRE was the standard method, as it is on the official wiki...

But if it's not a recommended framework, then I really don't feel like wasting my time debugging it.

I'll quickly check out the updated ZIP to see if that fixes my issues, and otherwise, I'll try the manual setup. Thanks for your direction! I'll be back if I have any further issues.

Again, thanks a lot!

Alright, so I checked out the two links you gave me. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but they didn't turn out quite as expected. The updated AppWizard is for VS10 only, and the manual setup tutorial is very outdated, and doesn't have the attachments and resource files it once had.

You said many users here don't use OGRE - I am only using it because it is what the tutorial instructed me to do, though I can see it is very outdated. Is there more up-to-date documentation on how to get up and running with PolyVox? I have not found any reliable documentation so far.

Thanks for your help.

There is not particular game or graphics engine which is recommend for use with PolyVox. Actually the library is lower-level that that, it simply provides a set of algorithms for generating mesh data from volumes, and it is up to the user to feed this data into whichever engine they are using for their project. So in this sense you should not let PolyVox dictate your choice of engine but should instead choose the engine which bet fits your project and/or which you have the most experience with.

The only real requirement is that your engine allows you to specify geometry at runtime (rather than just loading it from models from disk). For example, Ogre allows this with the ManualObect class while OpenGL allows you to construct vertex and index buffers. You will then need to convert the output of PolyVox into this engine-specific format. If you are not yet experienced with any engines or graphics/game programming in general then you should start with learning those first.

Documentation is indeed a problem with PolyVox - partly because I don't have time to write it and partly because what I do write gets out of date quite quickly. The same problem affects the Wiki - in the past I suggested removing the Wiki but there were some objections, I'll have to think about that again.

You might find some useful info on building here, though again I can't say how up to date it is (or relevant, as you were using CodeBlocks?):

http://www.volumesoffun.com/polyvox/doc ... stall.html

However, in the end the only reliable options are to read the source code and look at the examples (as this should always match the current state of the code). For people with strong knowledge of C++, graphics, and voxels this is usually enough, though I can understand it's not enough for less experienced users. Unfortunately voxel engines are a complex topic.

I am more or less familiar with graphics rendering and voxel concepts. I guess I just somewhat misunderstood PolyVox's aim. I now understand though, that PolyVox is a geometry generator, and that what ends up rendering it is entirely and utterly up to me. I will do some more looking about as you suggested, and see where I go from there.

Thanks for all the help!