Hello to all of you that read this! I am wanting to make a game, but have no idea where to start. I have been searching for reasonable, free 3d engines, and came across this one. I have a general idea of the game I would like to make, but I don’t have any experience in programming. I do know how to do some intermediate modeling and texturing.
If there is someone willing to team up with me as a programmer, I would apreciate that as well.
hi. welcome to panda3d.
good advice (and i mean good as in really good, brilliant etc).
go thorugh the “trouble” of learning python (might take you 2 weeks or so).
once you know the python basics, have a look at the manual, the samples and the api-reference.
without programming you wont get anywhere. and programmers who join your team tend to lose intrest in projects which are not their owns.
programmers are hard to find anyway since most are doing their own projects already.
so, get the hang of python and start get started 
ok. thank you for the advice ill start researching it.
ThomasEgi perty much hit it on the head. One place to look for help is this website. It doesn’t really teach you python, but is a great place to look for help on the code snips and what they do. It also has some examples on how to use the code…
Also heres a good fourm for python questions, but you can always ask them here too if you need. (I always end up calling python -> panda and panda -> python… so go figure, lol.)
forums.devshed.com/python-programming-11/
Also, like always, make sure you have the time to learn the code. Don’t just rush in into what you want to do. Take it slow and learn the code and you’ll win the race. 
ok. thank you.
just out of curiosity, do all models need to be single, “sealed” objects (not multiple objects simply attatched to each other)? if so, my ideas might become complicated…
there are almost no limitations on what you can do with models.
it’s quite flexible and if panda’s default file stuff is not flexible enough. you can simply write a small helper function which assembles a node of your choice and use that one instead.
if you explain what you want to do we can help you with it
what i mean is this: i am modeling a robot for my game. i am asking if all of the mesh needs to be one or if it was ok for there to be seperate elements for one object.
I can’t say I fully understand what you want to make Draakoraith, but if what you want is a robot in which the forearm, the arm, the torso, the head and so on are all separate nodes (perhaps with ODE bodies and connected by joints so that you can take more of a simulation approach) than yes, it’s perfectly possible.
Panda (or any other engine) doesn’t really know what you’re trying to make or what a given model is intended to be. So it doesn’t care whether you make your character as one mesh or multiple meshes. For the engine it’s just some meshes with position and rotation that it has to render. That’s it. If you want to, you can even make an anatomically correct character with all entrails, and each organ as a separate mesh. Panda doesn’t really care.
You’d want to keep them as one mesh.
The engine doesn’t care if its one ore many meshes but it’s a big difference for the GPU. Modern cards can draw millions of polygons but only hundreds of meshes.
while this is true, panda provides you with functinoality to merge unneccessary many meshes into fewer ones. so you can assemble it, merge it and the result is just as good as a single mesh.
thanks for the info guys! im hoping to learn the Python code soon so I can get started assembling the game 