I found a download for the game The Vampyre Story. Thought I’d check it out since it was made with P3D. The high frame rate was no surprise, since it has pre-rendered backgrounds for the environments.
Nicely rendered visuals. English voice over wan’t bad either, although the ‘game flow’ was somewhat dull.
Anyone knows if The Vampyre Story did well on the market or not? If those kind of games are still hot, might consider making one.
I aslo took a look through the files for the game. I wanted to see what finallized P3D files would look like after an installer has been made.
I really don’t know if those archives are something P3D produced or was it something the developers did on their own.
I thought P3D would not have the long load time after files have been converted to bam and an installer produced.
The Vamprye Story had a super long load time at the opening scene. This later became faster. Is that something to expect from P3D finished apps? I thought the long load times were associated with the .egg files only?
Panda3d can load both text-based egg and binary bam files, but what you use is totally up to you, the newest tools for distributing Panda games will probably do the convertion by default, but you aren’t forced to use Panda’s tools to distribute your game either. You can even write loaders for other 3d formats and not use egg or bam at all.
Panda supports “multifiles”, which you can think of as archives for loading your files from. However, you are free to use any other archive format, you’ll just need to write the code yourself.
So this being an open source engine, the developers of the game could change everything beyond recognition.
The slow opening scenes could be because the developers forgot to convert the egg files, or it could be something else.
Hm, what are you talking about? You actually know what’s inside an open source program, because it’s open source, you can just view the source, unlike closed source program, where you never know what exactly it’s doing.
You have to have some understanding of what you’re viewing. That’s what I’m talking about. Anyone can look into a source file, but it won’t help if you can’t pick out the good from the bad.
Open Source doesn’t mean out of any control. That you can make changes and contribution doesn’t mean you can put malware in the code without someone else noticing that. Open Source software isn’t a black hole that pulls everything in without thinking.
Most of the Internet runs on Linux and Apache, two of the most successful specimens of Free/Open Source Software. I think that tells a lot about the quality and reliability of it.
That’s why software has core developers and maintainers who review the patches, so that you don’t have to read through every line of every file to know the code won’t eat your food.
I understand your worries, which obviously come from not having much to do with the Open Source Software ecosystem, but that’s really not something you should be worried about. At least not in case of serious and long standing projects, like Panda.
Open source doesn’t mean anyone can contribute to it. There’s a limited amount of people with commit access, and contributions from non-developers happen through patches, which are always checked by a developer before committing.
If it was closed source, how would it be different? Closed-source programs are at least as likely to contain trojans than open-source programs.
The great thing about open-source is that there’s always a community of people also working with the source, who would understand the code and would notice a backdoor or trojan if it was there, and alert developers of this.
The scripts and procedures used to generate the installer exe are also published online (http://panda3d.org:8010), so are the programs and tools (thirdparty package on download page), so you could always grab those tools and build your own installer with the provided procedures.