Programming newbie looking for some help

General Discussion
1

I am trying to learn Python (and programming, actually) by reading some Python e-books, the Panda manual, and playing around with the samples in the Panda installation.

While I was editing the Roaming Ralph sample, I wanted to do a couple things (most of which are probably very easy to you guys):

  1. Remap the keys to WSAD so it follows standard FPS controls and allow AD to strafe instead of rotate. All of this didn’t take me too long to figure out.

  2. Change the camera perspective to isometric. This was a bit of trouble since I had no idea what HPR meant in terms of camera rotation but I think I got it to look right.

  3. This is the tricky one. I want to rotate Ralph so that he is always facing the direction of the mouse cursor. I found this code by pro-rsoft: discourse.panda3d.org/viewtopic.php?t=5409. Most of the things in there I don’t understand. I tried looking through the ShowBase module for “Plane,” “Vec3,” “Point3,” and “CardMaker” but couldn’t find any reference to them. Could someone tell me what those are and, perhaps, comment pro-rsoft’s code?

Sorry if I sound newbish. Only got into programming a couple days ago. :stuck_out_tongue:

2
  1. You can do so by calling base.cam.node().setLens(lens) where lens is an OrthographicLens instance.
  2. Those classes can be found in the API reference above. But have you already seen the “Looking and Gripping” sample?
3

Ah, #2 is easier than the method I used. Thanks for that one.

Yea, I tried the looking and gripping sample. What occurs is if you edit that sample file to reverse the heading by 180 degrees, the controls for his head will be reversed. For example: if you move the mouse to the top left corner, the model’s head moves to the bottom right. Etc.