I found Panda3d and have been fiddling around a little bit with it, but I’m mostly lost as to where I should start. I’ve tried looking for some example games that I could tear into, but most of the stuff I’ve found is just little snippets of stuff.
I was wondering if anyone could point me to a good place to start - The beginner tutorial on this site isn’t exceptionally in-depth, so probably a user-created tutorial would be good. I don’t want to start with anything over the top, for while my ultimate goal is an MMO of sorts, I’d like to do it in steps.
First step is just a really basic RPG type game. Fairly basic - Get quests, kill things, beat quests, etc. Also wanted is loading separate areas, such as a specific place just for one quest, different “main” locations (I’m thinking of a sci-fi thing, so different planets and such), and all of that fun stuff. This step is, of course, likely to be the longest and most in-depth. Beyond this depends on what is accomplished with this.
I’d appreciate any input - Tutorials are nice, especially those with pre-built games and the like that I can tear apart and analyze. It’s how I work best - Tear something apart, fiddle with it, put it back together, repeat, and then build my own with the knowledge gained.
Hello! I guess you won’t be happy after my answer, so wait for other ones!
The “places” where you can start are exactly those you pointed out: the tutorial in the manual and the examples provided. (There is a book that will be published, you can look for information about it in this forum.)
But I want to say that (imho) the cited resources are very adequate for the development of a game with Panda. You’ve said that the tutorial and the examples aren’t deep. I disagree with that: they cover many aspects of the engine, and they go straight to the point. These are examples that show how to use Panda, not how to develop an entire game. It’s like the Occam’s razor: when you show an example, you should avoid useless stuff, and I think this is exactly what Panda’s examples are doing.
Anyway, there are some topics that aren’t covered by examples, in these cases you could ask in the forums.
If you need other documentation on how to develop an entire game, you could find that on many books and sites (for this kind of topics you don’t need Panda-specific documentation). Instead, here, I think you could find mainly Panda-specific topics.
However, obviously this could be a great documentation (but I don’t think you should expect that from the developers of the engine). For example, the user ‘darthrigg’ is developing this kind of tutorials, and his work is wonderful. Maybe you could look for that.
Ah, I seem to have missed the Panda example programs. At the point I wrote that message the extent of stuff I had found was a pacing panda super-basic thing.
However, there are going to be many things that simply won’t be covered in these example programs. I would still much appreciate any tutorials/examples of more in-depth stuff that I could use
The community project Naith is probably the most in-depth example you will be able to gain access to the source code of.
[url]Naith] http://code.google.com/p/naith/
You know… if you really want to break it down… start with a simpe text base system first. Work on adding new fetchers till you have something to play with such as quest, killing things, and or w/e. Then start working on all the cool things such as graphics and sounds.
Q. Why?
A. In short, you’ll find that under all that GUI, pertys, graphics, sounds, ect is actully a text base game being play with server and client with other clients playing too.
You’ll find that the texts base game (not very perty) are still just as hard to code as the 3d ones if not harder.
Panda 3d will help with the 3d part, but if you have no underline code to work with it, then you’ll find your self lost like most new user trying to jump right into 3d without looking how deep the water can actully be lol… Trust me, I know xD
