I am new to panda3D and am working on a small school project using it. I really like how it works and am learning more and more every day. But I have some doubts. Since September last year there has been no activity on the homepage. There has been a projects portal in the making for longer than I can remember. There is activity on the forum but I didn’t see any really new cool stuff happening lately. What I also think is there is a need for good screencasts. This will lower the level for people new to panda. If you are really new to game programming and python the learning curve for panda is by far not as good as promoted.
I am asking this because I haven’t seen any innovations lately… Not even talking about the website that I think is prehistoric…
Panda3D is being developed steadily - there is a daily “nightly build” that keeps you up to date. A new milestone will propably then happen, once the autmatic shader creation thing Josh is working at is ready for general usage.
Till now there was no need to bring constant updates on the homepage since there weren’t too many “news”.
Panda3DProjects is - or better was - under development. We still don’t like to call it “final”, but it could be used by anyone who needs it (and has some reasons for… note: filesharing is NOT a good reason g)
The question “Is Panda3D dead?” comes nearly every half a year. - Do a search, you will find every time the same answer.
The forum isn’t dead too. New snipplets are being reported once in a while and general questions are asked all the time. If you are in the need to ask something, try it. You will most propably get an answer within a few hours.
So, if this question comes every time or so… I would suggest:
Make sure on the front page there is a link where you can get the latest nightly build… (so everyone sees activity) but also the latest stable one.
On the projects page, please remove the beta statement. Also make a summary like we currently have this many projects and the latest one updated was today at 16:00 named project NAME.
Make the little summary on point 2 also on the panda3d homepage.
Nobody will dare to ask again cause they see activity.
The nightly builds are not for common usage. They do contain experimental stuff and also may contain syntax changes. I don’t suggest publishing that.
The P3DP project still is in beta state due to the fact that the devs don’t have full time to work at it. Its working currently but not all errors are fixed. This it will stay signed “beta” until we have had time to fix it.
For all the stuff you mentioned, menpower is needed. Manpower that is currently not available because the existing manpower is either actively developing Panda3D itself or doing their real life jobs.
P3DP is also far from being complete (there are some thoughts for “level2” - including a sort of galery and projects summary and maybe some other stuff we aren’t sure about implementing).
But all of that work is done “as scheduled” - Panda3D first; after that current project is done, I think Pro-rsoft will have a bit more time for developing P3DP further.
It would not take much time to implement that – but I don’t see the point of it.
There is a project index – one can see there how much projects there are. I have just 2 secs ago added a project counter there, for people who can’t count, but why would someone want to see the last updated time of someone’s wiki, that would be private information… One can already see the last modified time of a wiki page, I don’t see why someone would need more.
I would like to add that I am new to panda3d and I have had great results with very little effort so far in my upcoming port of a game I work on when I can. The forum is active and we have some very helpful users (Kudos to Treeform and ynjh_jo in particular for my questions).
I think the best line I heard about panda3d is that it is easy to pick up but difficult to master. For your casual game developer I would highly recommend it. Esp when you consider that it works in Linux and Windows (and Mac?).
