the panda manual really doesn’t go through their networking system very thoroughly. among other things i’m a bit confused about a code sample they have on:
it’s not made clear where the PointerToConnection() function is coming from. Is that suppose to be a user defined function? Is it a function of the networking libraries themselves?
Is there any real advantage to using the Panda3d networking modules at all? I wrote a simple chat program before and the panda method of doing things seems much less straight forward to me.
There is no reason to use Panda networking if you have some other tool that you prefer. The Panda networking system does provide a Datagram-based communication layer, which can be convenient if this is the model used by your application; but if you have some other model it doesn’t help you.
The DistributedObject system is layered on top of Panda networking.
Let me preface to any moderator, I apologize if I’m not supposed to post this sort of thing from another engine site (esp. commercial).
I* found these incredibly informative in a very concise manner. I always had the “kinda” understanding of networked games. Reading over these put so much in focus. Things like “lerps” start making more sense, how to actually keep a server and N clients in sync. And let me say that the abstracted network layer makes implementing this sort of thing easy…oh I should/could share my code on that (a little more debug is in order) if anyone is interested.
Anyway, I just wanted to share these learning sources that helped me.