Looking for some information

General Discussion
1

Hello everyone, I just stumbled across Panda3D today after reconsidering the engine I would be using for the game I am working on (UE3/4 licensees might as well be made out of unobtainum for Indy developers) and have a few questions regarding the engine.

First I guess you may need some background on the game I am working on to give the best answers to my questions. The game I am working on is kind of a all-in-one Space RPG. I am attempting to make something that has many elements from different genres but the main focus areas are a RPG/RTS hybrid where there will be inter-changing gameplay between those two main genres.

I like using comparisons because it is better, and easier, to extrapolate examples from real world games so I am aiming for something like the X: Rebirth reboot place setting mixed with Eve-Online & Sword of the Stars/Sins of a Solar Empire in terms of gameplay. Essentially an RPG/RTS 4X game.

Here is a list of game features that I am considering adding so you can get a better idea of what the game would look like (right now it is only text based): lmpgames.com/wiki/Space_Crusade_Features

How compatible is Panda3D with these genres and 4X in general? I noticed that one of the games in the showcase was an impressive looking space MMO which is what peaked my interest in the engine when I was browsing earlier.

I also have a few technical questions though I may find the answers to these as I read through the documentation:

What file formats does Panda3D work with?

What software specifically can be used? I am considering getting Maya or 3DS Max for my modeling/animation solution for example.

Is the license really free for commercial use or are there some restrictions?

How moddable is the source code, how well documented is it within the actual source code, and can other external libraries be added, like SQLite 3?

Does Panda3D come with any tools or are there third party tools that can be used with Panda?

Thanks for taking the time to answer any of these.

2

The only limitations on the kinds of games made by panda is the skill and abilities of the games developers.

For file formats panda uses its own Egg format for meshes (several pipelines are provided) and many texture formats can be used, including dds.

Panda is a mod BSD license which is one of the most free licenses you can use (there are something like 2 or 3 clauses).

100% of Panda’s sourcecode is on sourceforge (there has been some movement to move it from cvs to mercurial or git, but that seems to have stalled)

Panda comes with some tools, such as art pipeline converters, but your most powerful tool at yrou disposal is your ide and copy of <favourite 3d program here>

3

Thanks, this info has gotten me started. Now for a real noob question, what MSVS 2008 project type does Panda3D run with and what requirements are there? I have tried Win32 and console but in both cases I run into trouble; either I get a compile error about WinMain (and then resulting errors from either overloading it or not having the args) not being used or an access violation error from the win console project.

Edit:

I think there is something wrong with my Panda3D install, hence the access violation. Going to reinstall the latest x86 version instead of x64. I was trying to adjust the Maya2Egg GUI py file to include Maya 2014 and I may have messed up the python files or other things with a few commands I tried with py2exe.

4

Yep, that was the problem. I reinstalled new x32 files and now its working as it is supposed to

5

Keep in mind that the latest buildbot builds use MSVC 2010 and not 2008:

6

Are there any practical differences between the two IDEs in terms of how Panda3D code is processed? Asking out of curiosity.

7

No, not really, the main difference is that the 2010 compiler has more features, seems to be more widely used at the moment, and that we no longer use WinSxS for the runtime libraries.