Sounds like a great idea. You’re welcome to do any improvement on that!
(weeks later)
I want to revive the discussion about the awesome demo - we wanted to wait till 1.6 was released, and it is now, no? 
I think we should do something regarding a tropical island and a beach. It’s not without reason that games like Farcry and Crysis start off like that - its nice to show off effects, since there are so many aspects to cover.
Should I create a public subversion that everyone can access (at google code for example)? Who wants to contribute to the project?
Whilst we have been delaying I’ve actually knocked up a basic fps demo. It wasn’t actually meant to become as such, but I wanted to play around with fps AI, and sort of needed a fps before I could do that… Anyway, I’m currently sitting on it until 1.6.1, as I need some of the fixes. (It runs on 1.6.0, but with some brute forcing and without some f/x I want, plus no crouching as I can’t detect if its safe to stand up.) Anyway, I’ll e-mail you what I have when I get home in a few hours - it has some problems, and I was planning on giving it a lot more polish before sticking it up on the forums, but there is quite a bit to be learnt from it even if we do start again. (I’m also half way through adding loading screens…) May I suggest a delay until the week after next, so pyweek is dust though? - I’m planning to have a go at it and I know Aurilliance is as well.
What about iron angles? Its small about 100mb and is a spaceship fps.
discourse.panda3d.org/viewtopic … ron+angels
What about star city? A space based sim city clone?
discourse.panda3d.org/viewtopic … ad0290ff31
What about that global soccer game?
discourse.panda3d.org/viewtopic … f638ec5465
or other cool Hypnos’s projects.
Those are great games, but they don’t achieve the goals we are aiming for here. For one thing their aiming to be games, when we are actually trying to demo panda via a game. This means we need tutorial quality code and a short but graphically mind blowing game - this is intended to be a stepping stone between the examples that come with panda and a full sized game. It also means we need something that is mainstream, and that people will want to fork and make actual games from, rather than the limited demo we aim to provide. It also means no multiplayer, as we can’t sustain that kind of community around a demo.
Now saying all that we could really do with some kind of repository of games made with Panda 3D on this site, with links etc - I know the screen shots are of some value there, but its not the same. Maybe have a list with urls and a rating system, so people can vote and the highest rated games get ordered first, so the community decides which are the best demonstrators of Panda so new people see them first. But please don’t let me hijack this thread with this off the cuff idea… again;-)
Count me, I can learn and produce some frameworks and effects.
I believe I can handle AI, ODE, some simple shaders, and etc.
this one’s broken treeform - could you provide a good link?
clcheung, we could certainly do with your help, especially as you appear to be quite good at making things look pretty, and that is key to what we are doing here:-) However, right now a small group of us are planning on going dark for a short while to quickly knock up a basic code base. Well, actually we already have one, but it needs extending and polishing a bit. The point is if we suddenly find ourselves with lots of people trying to code the game we will hit deadlock, spend forever discussing everything and it will go nowhere. The plan is to get the basics all together, so we have a playable game that is ready for all classes of asset to be contributed, and then put up a demo to pull people in and get us lots of helpers, of all types, where stepping on each others toes is less likely to be an issue.
We are only talking about a months delay however (Well, I hope, pyweek is going to slow things down.) - it really is a case of cleaning up some stuff we already have, extending some features and getting better examples; the other important things are getting together a basic level plan and art style guides - there is no point in having lots of art contributed if it all looks different! But nearer the time of that more substantial call for helpers I’ll PM you to get you early repository access:-)
(Oh, and hands off the AI. Its mine:-P Ok, I will accept help, but its kind of my speciality.)
No problem, I have a very long list of stuff to pick up in the current demomaster. Just let me know when you think it is ready.
Hey i was just wondering how this project was coming along as I am currently trying to write a First Person Shooter Engine on top of panda(just as panda is in C++ and only requires knowledge of python mine would be in python and only require knowledge of XML) and have been using Air-blade as a reference point but this sounds like it would save me a lot of time. So I was just wondering when it would be finished or if i could take a look at what you have so far
Its coming along, but its a long way from a ‘community release’ - that is what were calling the first version we will release, which is meant to bring in more people. Right now too much of the core functionality is up in the air really for us to support a large number of developers, plus we probably need some documentation to help new developers learn there way around and avoid that scenario where the current developers spend all their time cleaning up the code of new developers. (Plus our habit of using cutting edge cvs versions of Panda means we probably won’t be doing a release until 1.7.0 of Panda anyway.)
I’ll talk to the others though - we obviously want to maintain secrecy, but maybe we are at the point of letting a few people get an early look. Can help maintain momentum, and I don’t like turning people away.
btw, whilst our current effort would defiantly require coding to mod we have a fair bit of xml driving things, so we already have a chunk of what your after.
And I’m not sure how good an example airblade is - its rather old and I’m surprised it still works with Panda to be honest. Doubt its a good example of how to make a large system though, and that is one of the most important differences between this project and the examples - were (mostly) doing it such that it can scale to be a real game rather than a tech demo.
ya airblade doesn’t run anymore i was just using reading through the code to get ideas thats all I ment here as well wasn’t planning on modding it or even trying to run the code. I’m brand new to panda and Python so was just a way to get a feel for how to organize things. I have a lot of experience with PHP and adobe Flex/AIR so I do know what I’m doing. I was already planning on writing the whole thing out and then trashing it and rewriting it so hopefully your demo will come out about when im ready for the rewrite. If you like i will make sure to tell you when the Alpha is ready. It will basically be a much more extensive version of what your doing. The person making the game simply needs to make the models/animations/textures/sounds and put them in the correct folders and then write XML to stay how they will be used like as a map or a room or an object or a player and then wether that player is a computer bot or the main player and so on and so forth. so that if you had the rights to the models somebody could literally use it to make halo or Half-life 2 with out writing one line of code.
To revive this a bit, i think its great idea, and i would really love it.
Its a bit dead right now - I’ve just started a new job and don’t even have a desktop computer, let alone time to work on it. Don’t have anywhere to live either:-( (Crashing at uncles, which is a kind of hell.) I do intend to come back to it though, but momentum is going to need to be regained, and I think pro-rsoft has a lot of stuff that needs to be checked in before work can really continue. It requires a cvs build of Panda though, so can’t be released until 1.7.0 comes out anyway, which will be a while longer. But we do have a ‘playable’ game, its just lacking a lot of polish. Biggest omission is probably some enemies, which will require AI (Next non-debugging task on my list.). Plus it is all a bit programmer art:-)
Er, similar situation here. I barely have spare time, and all of it goes into Panda 1.7.0 development - as it keeps delaying I really want to get the Panda3D more presentable for a release.
The stuff I haven’t checked in yet is a mess, currently. I think we really need an FX pipeline before I can somewhat clean it up.
@lethe: please don’t wait for me to have checked in this stuff, to continue - I’ll probably need to rewrite most of it anyways.
pro-rsoft: Well, most of your stuff is fx, most of my stuff is gameplay - the only place we really step on each others toes is when it comes to non-code assets, most noticeably the level. If you can make sure there is nothing in your stuff like that you mind having to redo/copy back in then I can continue basically. Its going to be another couple of weeks at least before that can happen though. The other thing is that I really should fix Panda’s portal support before 1.7.0, but just don’t have the capability to sit down and sort through that mess right now. Not even convinced I could test any code changes on my laptop, which is all I have! (There are two key issues that needs fixing, based on my testing - neither is theoretically complicated, but in practise it is going to involve getting very dirty in that particularly messy sub-system. If my inferences are right both are the result of the original coder taking short cuts and doing things the easy way rather than the right way.)
everyone: Whilst here if there are any artists watching who would be interested in helping out we could do with someone to make it all look good!
Beh, there really should be a way to diff blender files.
Naw, I bet I haven’t made any changes I can’t redo, there. So feel free to change what you want.
+1 on the artist call - we really need talented artists that can do better than programmer art.
I don’t have a lot of experience, but I do have a lot of time. I would like to see Panda take off and get in the same conversations as C4 and Torque and all of the other pay to play game engines. My programming skills are extremely limited (learning a little more every day) but am willing to learn anything to help a noble cause.
I appreciate the sentiment but right now we have enough coders. Well, we don’t, but there is a stepping on toes issue - if we have too many coders when the core systems aren’t stable it becomes a nightmare to keep everybody in synch and not breaking each others edits. Once we have the core game stable we will open it up for everybody to make submissions to, but we need it large enough to avoid such scenarios first. Thanks for the offer though!
One thing I will say is this is not intended to be beginner stuff - it is meant to be an example of an actual game, and hence we are doing a lot of very sophisticated things - it is probably not a good playground for beginners, at least not until they have a fair amount of experience. Basically what I am saying is we might accept help at this stage from another experienced coder, especially one with lots of free time.