Today has been uneventful. I spent most of the day trying to get a good damage text system set up (you know, the little floating text ala WoW.) Right now there seem to be two good solutions to this:

• Using particle effects
• Using an ObjectTextDisplay

Both have their own unique little challenges. With the particle effects I would basically be setting up a point particle generator on the ship being damaged and generate a texture with the damage amount. Two roadblocks I ran into here were that I couldn't find much documentation on how to render a font into a texture and I had no experience with particle generators.

On the other hand ObjectTextDisplay looked promising, but I wouldn't automatically get a floating number, which was fine for now. David Mandelin was kind enough to post his python port of the OTD code on the ogre wiki, so I used that and fixed a few blatant errors. However, it isn't displaying anything at all after I enable it. Perhaps this is one of those Ogre workflow issues I have trouble with :) .

Tomorrow? I want to debug this OTD or see if I can maybe get a basic particle effects thing going without too much hassle.