Are there any known plans for a new Panda3D version? If so, is there any sort of roadmap?
I was unable to find anything about this in a forum search, and I haven’t seen any posts from Josh for a while now.
Although quite feature complete IMO, I know there are a number of bugs being worked around in the current version, and there are also features I’m sure that some of us would like to see integrated (perhaps more terrain support, networking functionality, etc).
Cheers,
Tim
i wouldn’t know about a roadmap. if you wanna have the latest version you can get the the up-to-date sources anytime and compile it yourself.
and well…
that’s true for terrain. it’s indeed very basic atm. but what’s bad about the current network? it’s acutally quite good.
aside from “better” terrain (which is a issue for itself) i’d love to see a cleanup for the collision system. easyer setup&usage and support for collisionsolid"box" would be great.
You could take a look at the CVS:
panda3d.cvs.sourceforge.net/panda3d/
Panda development never stops, or really even slows down very much. Every few months Josh releases a snapshot of the current version, but the development on the CVS trunk continues regardless.
There’s not a roadmap per se; we’re very results-oriented. We add features as we need them, and we fix bugs as we find them. We’re also happy to accept submissions from any user who wishes to add his or her favorite feature. 
David
Oh! ehh…
I guess David was not using the term “submission” in this way
Talking about submissions, David, what kind are you expecting ? I guess a very few people except you and Josh would be able to enhance a core feature.
Well, all the code is there for anyone who wants to take the time to read it and learn how it works; I imagine anyone with some real experience developing C++ code would be perfectly capable of contributing something meaningful. In the past, I’ve accepted various submissions ranging from small little bugfixes to major new features, from people I’ve worked with in the past and from people I’ve never heard of before.
Specifically, I’d prefer to see code that attempts to follow the existing coding standards (see panda/src/doc/coding-style.txt), and that fits well with Panda’s existing usage conventions. Intelligently structured, well-designed, well-written, and well-commented code is a plus.
David
Great, thanks for all the replies! It’s been a while since I delved in, so I didn’t realize that we were still getting regular updates via CVS. This is good information for anyone looking at the engine. It might be a good idea if someone were to add that bit about continual development somewhere in the About Panda 3D area.
Nice to see that the community remains so active as well!
Cheers,
Tim
Any quick way to find out what is in CVS that isn’t in the current release?
Not a quick way. You’d have to scan the cvs logs and read the commit comments.
I use a tool called cvs2cl.pl (you can Google for this) that reads all the cvs logs in a source tree and boils it down into a single easy-to-read ChangeLog file. Be sure to give this script a while to run–half an hour or so. There are lots of logs in Panda.
David