"Captain Panda--Across the Night"; A Panda3D Tech-Demo

[Thaumaturge]

Some time ago, a few of us gathered to build a new tech-demo game for Panda3D. This demo is not the whole of that, but it is one completed section: “Across the Night”

View the official download page here! Captain Panda - Across the Night

The game features six-degrees-of-freedom space-combat (in either first- or third- person): Pilot your choice of three different ships against flights of Mechanoid rocket-ships, all while trying to reach the portal that lies on the other side of the asteroids.

Visually, much of the game is presented via custom PBR shaders, alongside a variety of effect-shaders for things like explosions and booster-flames. The game also features an original soundtrack as well as original sci-fi sound effects.

To say something of the development process – in previous versions of the tech-demo, “Section 1” included the procedural generation of a spaceship, selected by the player in first-person. This section made liberal use of postprocessing effects and other advanced features, but was said by several community-members to run slowly on all but the most recent graphics hardware.

Our development team had high ambitions at the outset to build something spectacular to showcase what the Panda3D engine can do. “Across the Night” is just a portion of this vision, a vision which included a demonstration of many different art styles, rendering techniques, and gameplay types.

Although this original vision has still not been fully realized, we believe that such a thing may one day be achieved. We hope you enjoy “Across the Night”, and that it inspires you to build your vision in Panda3D.

[LifeLand]

This is amazing! I really hope this get’s pinned, because this could be a great first introduction to seeing what panda3d’s capable of.

[Thaumaturge]

Thank you very much!

And indeed, part of the motivation for this was to have something that can be used to showcase the engine, to show some of what it’s capable of.

[sazearte]

is there a way to contribute?
I could try to add an online mode and a mission with an objective.

Then we would have a complete demo to present

[Thaumaturge]

Hmm… Some of the code is quite hacky, and I employed some old-fashioned techniques in constructing models and the level (in short, I still use Blender 2.78 + YABEE). For this reason we decided to keep the code private, rather than making it broadly available.

That said, if you’re okay with working on a project in such a state, there is a discussion message-thread where you might talk further with the other member(s) of the project, and get a link to the repository.

If you were to do so, I would request that your version make it clear that it’s a derivative version, both in indicating that your changes were not made by the current project members, and in keeping the original credits.

[Simulan]

Shield shader hitching mini-update!

We have implemented a fix that eliminates the chug / hitch which was present when the player first makes contact with the Mechanoid fighter shields (or indeed, when the Mechanoid first makes contact the player’s shields, as it goes).

This update is really quite minor, but it does noticeably improve the first impression of the combat sequence, I believe.

Updated binaries available here on itch: Captain Panda Across the Night by Simulan

[Thaumaturge]

Thank you for so updating and posting! (And it’s good to have that hitch removed, I do think!)