It is assumed that you first change to the directory by typing “cd” in the command prompt, which means that you don’t need to specify absolute paths.
It does, at least it should. It does contain more optimised versions of your game models and Python code, though, so that may be why you see a smaller file (in fact, I’m quite surprised that your resulting .p3d isn’t even smaller).
This is where the .p3d is mounted through the VirtualFileSystem. The files that it’s reading don’t actually exist there; it acts as a ‘portal’ through which you can access the files in the .p3d archive directly.
Remember that packp3d packs your game into a .p3d archive, which can be ran using the Panda3D runtime. pdeploy turns this .p3d archive into a self-contained installer .exe that contains the Panda3D runtime in itself. (pdeploy does not modify the .p3d archive in any way.)
So, you first need to make sure you can run the .p3d file to begin with. Once you can run the .p3d file perfectly, you can then start to find out why the installed game as installed by the .exe isn’t working.
Usually, when people get this issue, the problem is that they have a name == ‘main’ conditional in the main file. In the Panda3D runtime environment, the name variable is not main, so it will in that situation silently exit without doing anything.
For more on that problem, see: