I am planning a project right now, however before I get down and dirty into it, I was just wondering if a few of my ideas are even possible:
1: Cover system and gameplay similar to Gears of War (love the game play style- hate the crashes).
2: Heroes and henchmen system similar to Guild Wars (I like the idea of taking some cannon fodder er helpers into battle).
3: I was going to ask about drivable vehicles, but then I realized that Pirates Online has them. So nevermind there.
4: Instanced battlefields- Guild Wars again. A different battlefield each time you exit a town.
5: Towns/ cities are safe havens from the enemies of the world. Unless it’s a special mission or otherwise. Creatures can’t get in, no need to equip weapons.
6: PvE mostly. You can go into a special arena for PvP. (Again, I believe that Pirates did this).
Any insights/ assistance on these would be greatly appreciated.
your questions are of pretty advanced state. you should know, that games you know and mention are made by dozens of professionals. i would wonder, if you ever get a vehicle and a track running and looking fine.
making games is really not a few days job. you’ll spend weeks, until understanding how things actuially work and first then, you should think about such features.
sorry for destroying your dreams, but i’ve never seen a 3d RPG made by one single beginner…
just to answer your questions: it’s all possible, but you’ll need to spend really much time to get anything from those running.
Uhm, that pessimistic opinion from Nemesis aside, what you’re trying to do is perfectly possible with Panda3D. The question “Can panda do this or that” is asked quite often, actually. Most of these can be answered with a simple “Yes” since you can do virtually anything with Panda, because you have a lot of control over its subsystems.
Thanks for the speedy replies everyone. Now that I know that these things can be done, I’m willing to spend the time, effort, and whatever else it’s going to take to make it happen.
There seems to be a ton of documentation out there for Panda3D, and also alot of minds to “pick” for learning purposes. I started out with the Torque Game Engine- good idea, not enough documentation, not enough people willing to give out information on how they did something. The website links are also dead pretty much all the time too…
Was going to try XNA, but I’m ticked at Microsoft for that whole buggy Windows Live/ Gears of War thing…
I don’t see it as pessimistic at all, just realistic.
To the OP, please forgive me for being a bit presumptuous, but reading between the lines (ie. the fact that you are even asking those questions tells me certain things) I’m guessing you are thinking that you want to make sure the engine can do what you ultimately have in mind before you waste time learning it. That isn’t really the right mindset to have at your stage, but I’m heartened to see that in your second post you focus on what actually does matter at your stage, the level of documentation.
Basically, when first starting out on this journey of learning how to develop games you want to go with whatever is easiest to learn. It is unlikely that any of the issues you mentioned in your first post will even matter until you’ve been practicing for over a year, so you want a tool that’ll make that initial learning period as short as possible. If after that initial learning period you feel you need to switch to a different tool to achieve your goals, well then switching to a knew development tool after already learning all the fundamentals is trivial compared to learning the fundamentals in the first place.
