Engine Troubles over Tentacle Planet, part 2

Since the last report I've added: a controllable spaceship, bullets, tentacles and I made an unsuccessful attempt at producing a Linux binary.

For the controls I use the OIS library. I was already familiar with this due to my clois-lane library. The controls work but don't feel quite right yet and need some minor adjustments.

Adding bullets was straightforward. The most time was put into the tentacles and the attempt at making a statically linked Linux binary.

The tentacles are Ogre prefab cubes plot along a B�ézier curve. The P1 and P2 control points and the P3 end point are assigned a new x,y,z coordinate each frame. This coordinate is picked by walking through 3D Perlin noise with a random movement vector for each point. (The vector was created randomly at creation time, it's stays the same from frame to frame.)

The code is a huge mess by now and it is getting in the way. Next priority should be a clean-up.

• [X] rolling terrain (high)
• [X] controllable spaceship (high)
• [X] improve controls (low): The controls aren't quite there yet, especially moving left and right.
• [X] bullets (high)
• [X] cmake file (low)
• [X] basic tentacles (high)
• [X] shootable tentacles (high)
• [X] collision detection: spaceship vs terrain (high)
• [X] collision detection: spaceship vs all other entities (high)
• [X] tentacles that shoot small spores (medium)
• [X] roaming (bigger) spores that attack the player (medium)
• [X] some minor GUI elements showing the score, highscore and FPS. (high)
• [X] make binary release for Windows (medium)
• [X] spaceship needs to cast a shadow in the terrain to judge heights (high): Solved this by using prefab entities instead of a manual object.
• canceled: make binary release for Linux (high): This is just too much of a hassle. The Ogre package for Debian didn't come with static libraries and compiling it myself with "–disable-shared –enable-static" didn't produce them either so this is going to take too much time.
  Eventually I managed to build static Ogre libraries but ran into other problems when compiling with "-static". Statically compiling is something I have no experience with and this looks like it is going to take too much time for the ILGE 2010.
  For Linux it seems distribution by deb and rpm packages will be the best solution. (What a revelation!)

The code for the latest version isn't available yet since it is a horrible mess. Keep watching http://www.aerique.net/software/etotp/ (not up yet) if you're interested.