Hey Panda3D enthusiasts, we’ve just completed our first Panda3D game jam of 2022 and we’re excited to share the results.
Behold Sandastray, a game about windsurfing on procedural quicksand dunes and collecting resources in the desert. The goal of this game is to surf and glide around to find hovering coins which mark resource collection areas for your dune-crawling city ship.
We built this procedurally generated sandbox game with physics based windsurfing and gliding in just two weeks! This was enabled by the awesomeness of Panda3D and the not insufficient code-slinging capacity of our dev team.
Feel free to download, play, complete, and study Sandastray!
We encourage users to submit Issues on the repo page in lieu of posting gameplay complaints here. There are a few bugs and some built-in-two-weeks rough edges; we may push fixes time permitting.
As it stands, the game is a fully playable prototype of the somewhat ambitious concept we set out to achieve. Many thanks to all those involved.
Well done and congratulations to the members of the team on this! It looks pretty neat–and I’m impressed by those procedural dunes!
Indeed, if I may ask, what were the principles behind the dunes? (I’m not asking a full tutorial, mind–just the generalities.)
I hope that you’ll forgive me, but I don’t want to sign up for another website just to report what is likely a minor issue. So, let me put it here: On attempting to run the program (via “python3 main.py”) I’m getting the following error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "main.py", line 7, in <module>
from keybindings.device_listener import add_device_listener
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'keybindings'
[edit] I see now that I can apparently sign in with GitHub, but I’m inclined to leave this here for now, if I may.
I’ll defer to @janEntikan for a technical description of the dune creation process, but as I understand it, they are made from Perlin noise heightfields which become ShaderTerrainMesh.
Yeah, the camera rig was never my favorite aspect of the game either. I’ll see about putting an update together sometime soon for the repository. I discovered a significant performance improvement in the meantime as well that I’d like to upload, related to physics.
Hey Panda3D enthusiasts, here’s a major update to the Sandastray game:
An entire Sandastray music album now loops for your enjoyment. 5 original tracks by Tael.
Implemented threaded physics for a major performance boost. This should also smooth out the intermittent startup performance.
Added a Sandastray application icon.
Added a setup.py to the source code so you can build this game into an executable yourself, and study how this is performed for a Panda3D game with assets and external dependencies.
Slightly deferred addition to setup.py to pick up the .wav files. I’ve updated the executables on itch as well for that.
