Panda3D Hello World Tutorial Good, short, easy. But not a game. The areas it covers are well explained, but because of it’s small scope it doesnt cover much. It’s a small animated scene, not a game. So anyone looking for how to make game will want more. My main feedback here is to change the tutorial end. The links it provides are good, but I suggest adding links to more panda3D resources and my game fast
Ars Thaumaturgis Beginners Tutorial for Panda3D Excellent scope. A whole game, including building it. The table of content is good, the lessons are of reasonable size and it’s fairly easy to tell which lessons covers what. Some of the steps were difficult to follow, with take the code from there and put it here. There is referenceCode, but the tutorial itself doesnt link back to or mentions it. My main feedback here would be to add a link to the reference code at the end of each lesson. Now it’s only mentioned in the ‘start here’ section and I completely forgot it existed.
My Game Fast: Panda3D Shooter It’s apparently ten years old now, but still good. The things it teaches are very interesting. It does open with a ‘start this other program and work your way through it’s tutorial/introduction’, which was a bit like signing up for cycling lessons and getting handed scuba gear and then pushed into a swimming pool. L3DT is a very interesting tool and I’ll probably use it a lot in the future, but I did come here to learn about using Panda3D. I particularly like the minimap section, I’ve seen minimap tutorials for other engines and none of them came close to the simplicity, elegance and functionality of mygamefast’s minimap. The biggest problem with this tutorial is that the titles and texts with each issue dont really say much about the topics they cover so looking up how to do something can be a bit difficult. There are also some formatting problems, for example this section lacks the proper indentations, which led to interesting problems with the if and elif trees. It ran, but it was impossible to tell at this point if the key inputs were having the desired effect. There are also some mistakes, with some code too soon or too late. For example, the water already has a collisionMask when the tutorial still says ‘you can fly through the water for now, we’ll fix that later’. The flying was smooth at first and then quite clunky. The clunkiness gets fixed in volume 6, page 3 which is a bit late. There are sections of code related to fog, but no fog has ever shown up for me during the tutorial and I have no idea why, I havent investigated it yet. It’s also incomplete, it stops before adding any attacks. But as I said, a good tutorial, covers some interesting areas.
Doing all three feels like it gives a good basis for working with Panda3D. And doing them in the order I’ve listed them here feels like the best order to do them in.
Tutorials I havent gone through yet:
The four books from the more Panda3D resources. Particularly Fireclaw: panda3D tutorial looks interesting.
