I was wondering whether Panda3D can be used within Xcode? I’m looking to use some of the 3d functions to load and display a 3ds model to be put on the iphone simulator, where I found out about Panda3D from a list of 3D game engines it had marked Panda3D down as being able to be used for the iPhone. How would I go about linking it in to Xcode?
Any help is greatly appreciated. I
Panda comes with a set of command-line build scripts that run the same on all platforms, so we don’t put a lot of effort into supporting a platform-specific IDE. That is, you can compile it on a Mac (or for an iPhone) without ever firing up Xcode; it uses gcc to build itself instead.
That said, it could probably be built within Xcode too, if you really want to do that; since after all, Xcode does use gcc internally. You’d have to create a new project and import the source code, and set the include path and lib path to the appropriate directories. It would be very similar to the instructions for building Panda using MSVS on Windows. Maybe someone else on the forums has experience doing this and can give you specific advice.
Now, if your goal is to use Panda to build an iPhone app, my advice would be to wait at least a couple of months on that. The iPhone support is real–I have compiled and run several games for my own iPhone–but it is not yet ready for mainstream release, and requires a very experienced hand to use it right now. Our intention is to make this a lot more automatic and easy-to-use soon, but this will take a couple of months as I have to finish up the web-browser project first (which is itself almost done).
You’re welcome to familiarize yourself with Panda in the meantime, though, and decide for yourself whether the engine’s other qualities suit your needs.
David
Thanks for that info David. I’ll look out for developments, I can certainly wait for a couple of months for a solution to the problem.