As of late I felt the urge to expand my meager knowledge of the deus working inside the black box “computer”. As I ventured beyond the mysteries of hello world programs I started to look for cheap or free solutions to “make computer games”. Thereby I stumpled upon panda 3d. Now I have read the manual and know that panda supports most of the cool techniques that make state of the art games look good so please don’t point me to the manual and/or google.
My Question and what led me to asking at all: Watching the showcase movies I felt reminded of the early 00 years. No antialiasing, no normal maps, no anisoptric filtering no per pixel lighting, no whatsoever. Now, the manual says that you could actually use directx 9. So Id like to know: Is panda3d to slow after all to be fired up with a decent resolution and directx 9 effects or are the implementations buggy or is this just a way of saving time?
This sounds like I am an better-knowing asshole but I’m really not. I don’t know nothing about anything and am here to be enlightened by you.
besides: Hello everybody, here I am and I’m here to stay
I guess it’s mostly a “saving time” thing. Many of the projects highlighted in the demo videos were created in a very short time by students at CMU. Since fancy rendering effects requiring pixel shaders usually add more time onto a project, they often don’t get done at all for rapid-prototyping projects like these.
Recent versions of Panda now include an auto-shader generator that make it much easier to enable these kinds of effects by default. But most of the videos predate this shiny new feature.
Also, some of those videos might actually date back to the early '00 years. Panda’s been around for a while, though it does keep up with current technology too.
Maybe you were looking at videos of the Disney games, such as Pirates of the Caribbean or Toon Town? These games are designed to work on a wide variety of hardware, so I’m sure parallax mapping and deferred shading are the last things they plan to implement. (Or, in the case of Toon Town, wouldn’t make sense!)
If you look in the screenshot section on this site, you will see games using normal mapping. It might not be super-shiny ultra-bumpy, but if your artist is doing their job right you won’t notice it aside from when it’s turned off and you see how flat the models look…
Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are supported by the engine. So is multisampling. Heck, it can do coverage sampling to augment normal multisampling.
Pixel-perfecting lighting is supported out of the box with an advanced automatic shader generator system.
Not really sure what your point is? What do you mean, “DirectX 9 effects”? Do you mean shaders? The autoshader will do a lot, especially in the upcoming 1.7.0 release, but it’s no magic bullet.
If you want to use a lot of really advanced rendering techniques, it will be up to you to write shaders for it.
Thank you very much for the quick information. Well, then I’ll try it out and look if my small brain can understand this engine.
Currently I do have about half a dozen Blender Models and 2 Pages filled with crude ideas. If any of this works out it could be really fun though.
If I don’t post my project or ask stupid questions within the next 60 days consider me another victim of high ambitions and low substance.
