Cube Sumo Idea - is panda3d the right program for that idea?

General Discussion
1

(First: i am not an english native… don’t tear me to pieces :wink:)

Hi, i have an - maybe - interesting idea, but i am new to python and to panda3d (i never did more than “hello world with walking panda”).

The idea: In the game are two “cube-sumos” fighting against each other. The great thing about those sumos should be: you can only control them indirect by coding their brains.

Without brain they fell on the ground, because they cannot balance their body. (therefore i need something like ODE… in this forum i read PyODE is great, is it?)

The brain should includes:

  • control every bone (brain gets information about all bones, e.g. feet_left.angle = 35° in direction x and so on)
  • control health (e.g. health is under 35%, stop fighting offensive, start defense)
  • read out what sumo can see (e.g. where is sumo? is he in the middle or near to the ring-end?
  • control strength (e.g. 84% strength, attack foe if possible or wait until strength raises up to 90%)

with this information it should be possible to fight against other sumos… it’s like those robot-wars championships.

  1. can panda3d do something like this?
  2. is it possible to create a game like this without much knowledge of panda3d and PyODE? (my knowedge: little bit pascal, delphi, bash, lazarus, fpc, php, html, css, xml… and for graphics blender and gimp)
    I think ODE and the “brains” are the most difficult, isn’t it?
2

hi there =)

well for grafic panda should be able to do it without any problems.
for physics and your brain… well i cant really imagine how you imagine your game so i cant tell if you really need ODE at all. in many cases you can achieve a simmilar behaving with some simple math+python … depending on what cube-sumos are^^

for the brain-part:
panda has a nice finite-state-machine, python allows interactive programming so i think you have everything you need :slight_smile:
i dont have a concrete imagination on how you programm those sumos in-game. but if it’s just something like in robot wars where you read sensor-data and act accordingly it shouldn’t be too difficult.

so to answer your question…if it’s possible to code such a game with no experience than the best thing you can choose is panda =) python and panda are quite easy. if you leave out the ODE thing you should be fine :slight_smile: