I’ve just released panda3d 1.4.0. Like any X.X.0 release, it is likely to be a little buggy. But it does have a lot of the things that people have been asking for (eg, maya 8.5 exporter, etc).
good news!
i am very happy to see the new version. Jose, thank you for your good work.
This is sooooo kewl 
thanks Josh
I especially like the projected shadows example 
Oh, for anyone interested in changelog:
panda3d.org/download/panda3d-1.4 … -1.4.0.txt
And one question:
Does that mean I don’t have to link with NSPR anymore when compiling?
And btw. the online API Reference still points to 1.3.0.
Great
Very interesting. Is this manual page already written? I didn’t find it. But this might be me being a bit tired.
The shadow tutorial is impressive, for sure. But it seems one of the shaders is missing ( caster.sha ). The tutorial runs without this shader too, I just get some error messages when closing the application.
Thank you for the new release!!!
enn0x
Nice! 
I wonder what the
means.
Plus: I wonder what level the ODE-Implementation has… ^^
Anyway… nice to see Panda3D getting better and better! XD
Regards, Bigfoot29
Hey guys! It’s nice to thank me, and all, but remember - I’m just the guy who packages it up and puts it on the website. Most of the real work was done by the guys over at Disney, and a lot of that, by David Rose. Give them a round of applause, please.
Round of applause (and more importantly beer) to the guys over at Disney and David Rose!
what are the plans on mac build?
thanks, Josh Yelon
No plans for the mac build. Right now, releases take way too long. It’s been almost a year since the last one. Adding mac would make those releases even further apart.
If I could speed up the process, I could possibly start thinking about squeezing mac in there as well. I’m trying to design a fully-automated panda regression tester, which tests the CVS head on several different OS’s. If I could get this working, then the releases would probably go a lot faster, and I could start thinking about making them more complex.
yes that would go a long way! Thanks for all the work Josh!
Thehe… of course also thanks to Disney - and drwr in the first place…
As Josh pointed out: He is the “good guy” from Disney doing all (well much of it) the forum work. He is also one of the devs/programmers. 
Regards, Bigfoot29
AWESOME!!! AWESOME!!! 
Thanks to Disney and David Rose! Thanks too all who contribute!
let me add some minus :
- loader (model)
It now ignores .bam and .pz files when we pass a filename without extension. The 1st time I realize that was when it loaded 156 MB .egg’s, rather than the .bam’s. It was dumped to disk endlessly, which never happen before. - ffmpeg texture
a very tiny hole hasn’t been fixed :
discourse.panda3d.org/viewtopic.php?t=2849
about the new movie classes, what are they meant to be used for ?
Seems that only for per-frame operation.
about the shadow tut :
I learned something, the shadow’s coord must be calc’ed in the vtx shd, to optimize the performance. But that is not as free as it look, I guess, because it’s hard to give the shadow a fixed amount of push for different models. Using camera scale doesn’t work for that.
oh, I scale the panda not in vtx shd, so it casts shadow too.
the rest is EXCELLENT, as usual.
GREAT, thanks a lot everyone !
Actually there is a new config variable that will let you set the default extension for that. Its in the changes file … I’ll look for it and post it.
About the new egg/bam behavior…
There’s this new thing called the model-cache. The intent is that you never create bam files explicitly yourself. Instead, you just enable the model-cache, and it automatically generates bams for you. It updates them whenever needed. The only time you would think about bams explicitly is when your game is finished, and you’re about to release it. In that case, you’d have to do some manual fiddling to create explicit bams and enable their use (by changing that config.prc variable default-model-extension).
Unfortunately, that was the plan. In practice, I enabled the model-cache under windows, but I couldn’t figure out where to put the model-cache under linux. I’m torn between putting it in your home directory (secure, but not shared), or putting it in a common location (say, /var, which means all the machine’s users can share it, but one user could corrupt it on purpose and cause havoc.) I’m leaning toward putting it in the home directory, since most game developers have a private PC anyhow.
Correction … I am unable to load any .bam.pz file now … at least with pview.exe
pview modelname doesn’t work even when I set the default extension. I get an error stating that loading models with an implicit extension is deprecated in 1.4.
pview modelname.bam.pz doesn’t work either. Says that the file is not in the current model path even though I invoked pview from the model’s directory.
pview modelview.egg works fine.
Oh, I should mention about this:
I know exactly what was happening there… it was, indeed, reading your egg files. It was also creating BAM files and storing them in the model-cache — that’s what was dumping to disk. Next time you run it, it should be fast, because it will be using the BAMs in the model-cache.
Edit the last statement above to :
pview modelview.egg works fine but does not create a bam.pz file even though the model cache is enabled in my etc/config.prc
In my config.prc I have model-cache-dir $THIS_PRC_DIR/…/modelcache but no modelcache directory or bam.pz file is created
OH DOH!!! THIS_PRC_DIR is C:\Panda3D-1.4.0\etc not my default project folder. Problem fixed … thanks!
P.S. Would be nice to be able to switch to the 1.3.2 behavior here as an option.