Panda right for the job?

General Discussion
1

A friend of mine - a history buff, Civil war reenactor and history prof, and I - programmer - have been kicking around the idea of using game technology to build an instructional simulation of Civil War battles.

This isn’t a commercial project and whatever we produce will be freely available at no cost if used for educational purposes.

We’ve sketched out what we need in terms of capability and I was hoping the people who’re familiar with Panda could take a look out the requirements outline and tell me if Panda will cover them.

If Panda isn’t a good fit then we’re open to suggestions. Our budget consists of our spare time and whatever our respective wives will let us spend which isn’t much.

Here are the requirements as we currently see them:

The software should support the following:

-Plug-in allowing viewing/interacting via a browser.

-Pre-programmed movement, i.e. run the battle as it was fought with an attendant clock/calendar, voice-over annoucer. The clock should be controllable as to start time and rate, i.e. one minute of real time equals one hour of simulation time, controllable by viewer.

-The option of selecting some individual, position, weapon, road, any other object, and getting detail associated with that object. A soldier’s story, the importance of a position, road, the source, value, importance of a weapon, etc.

-Modifying the view as point-of-view zooms in and out. That is, at a certain distance from the battlefield the view changes from that of individual features, soldiers, etc to a more schematic view showing overall movements and positions.

-User-moveable point-of-view.

-Control of lighting conditions to simulate time of day, of year and weather conditions.

2

darn, didn’t notice that I hadn’t logged in. This ought to be under my user-id.

Allen

3

How dead-set are you on the browser requirement?

The only tool I know of that (realistically) lets you create games in a browser is flash. But this sounds like a pretty big game for a flash game.

4

How dead-set are you on the browser requirement?

It’d be nice, not a necessity.

Mostly I’m looking for the tool appropriate to the job. A couple of years ago I tried using VRML but that wasn’t up to the job not to mention the amount of work necessary to get even modest worlds working.

A browser plug-in would make the installation problem go away but I’d rather have something working then wait for the perfect situation and given the volume of work involved to build any sort of simulation like this a tool that’s designed to speed up production would be a real plus. That’s what kicked off my interest in the use of Panda.

5

Aside from the browser thing, panda can certainly do all of that. But note that panda doesn’t contain any simulation code. It’s only going to handle your rendering.

For example, you said “Pre-programmed movement, i.e. run the battle as it was fought with an attendant clock/calendar, voice-over annoucer. The clock should be controllable as to start time and rate, i.e. one minute of real time equals one hour of simulation time, controllable by viewer.” That’s all simulation stuff.

Now, granted, some 3D engines would actually interfere with your doing that sort of thing. Panda won’t — it will work just fine with that kind of simulation. But you will have to write the simulation code yourself.

6

I forgot to mention. This summer, I’m planning on writing a “prepackaged game” wizard for panda. The idea is, you write a game, then run the wizard, and it zips everything up along with a copy of panda and turns it all into a nice little EXE file. So that might solve your installer concerns?