Guys, im new to this panda3D engine… and i happen to bump in to your website and find it very useful for the proposed game for our thesis… Well our problem is we dont know where to start… We’ve been learning c++ for quite sometime now, still, we have no idea where and how to start… Does anyone of you have the time to tutor us, or me to start our 3D game? thank you guys!mail me at stephenjohn_borja@yahoo.com
Good Day and More power to panda3D! 
Hello and welcome to panda3D !
first off… why would you want to use c++ if you dont know how to use it? try python. if you know how c++ works you can learn python in a single day.
for your question where to start. look at the manual link is in the navigation bar above.
the chapters wit (CXX) are c++ related. since the manual pages doesnt allow ++ it was changed in xx. there are the most basic information you need to get started. for the rest you have to hit the api-reference or the sourcecode.
once again. panda was made to be used with python.most of us do and it has a significant number of advantages.
if you have questions. those are best answered here on the forum so others can learn from it,too.
well at first we were using java as our main tool to create the 3D game using eclipse… but it seems the resources were few so we shifted to c++… we were adviced that c++ is the best tool to create such 3D Rpg games(which we proposed for our thesis).
Can you enlighten us with more ideas such us, what language best suited to create the game, how will it be coded and where to start, and what are the compatible graphics software to be used for creating the game.?
most of your questions are answered in the manual.(link is above in the navigation bar)
the nice thing with panda is. it’s written in c++ but programmed in python 
so you get all the c++ speed at engine-level while having all the advantages of python as programmer.
python is my absolute favorite. it’s about as easy as thinking. no compile-times, no braket nightmare, you dont need to care about memory or variable types… you just write code and it works, or you’ll get a error pointing you straight to your mistake. aside from that you dont have to wait for your game to compile. so you can add a line, run it, add another one. run it… try it i can garantuee you wont want to do anything else after you experienced it.
this means, fast engine, rapid prototyping , short learning-curve (due to python), code runs crossplatform (in most cases without changing a single line).
panda applications can be written entirely in python (in fact thats what panda was designed for). but if you want to you can write your own c++ extensions as you need it ( i doubt you will need it).
if you want to get started. download panda, have a look at the samples in your panda-installation (they are not beautiful but they show how do some basic things with panda), see the manual and api-reference.
for tools (to create game-content) you can use max, maya,blender,wings… panda can read a variety of different files/formats. 3ds,x,egg,dxf,collada(still experimental). if prefer blender. its a bit hard to learn but an excelent tool with a great exporter. disney mostly uses maya iirc.
i hope this answers some of your questions. if you have more. feel free to ask
some more advantages if you use panda:
-some great performance monitoring tools to trackdown bottlenecks almost instantly. (sounds boring but its incredibly useful)
-a great community (this includes the panda-developers themselves)
thanks a lot Thomas… you did showed me the light… but anyways, is the panda3Dengine the whole body of the game structure? what i mean is, are we going to code the entire game using the panda3D. i havent finished downloading the software due to the lack of internet connection here at our school.
thanks though for the info… i’ll try to repost anything if i/we couldn’t understand anything… God Bless! 
you can write the entire game in panda3d.
except for the artwork which has to be created with 3d-party editors such as maya/max/blender (for 3d) and photoshop/gimp (for 2d) and your favorite soundeditor.
panda can handle the rest, rendering, input-system, network, physics, sound… its all there already. you just have to make use of it.
MR. Thomas…
I’m currently reading the manual specifically panda3D:Starting panda3D… its the first tutorial… now when i started the program, its ran successfully loading the gray screen…
so i head on to the tutorial no.2 which is loading the grassy scenery, now i did follow the codes… but upon running it in the command prompt, it only showed the gray screen the same as the one in the first tutorial… so i’m thinking, i might have saved my filename in the wrong folder… can you tell me where exactly should i place my .py filename for it to be able to load the images and etc.?
thanks a bunch…
do you happen to have a YM id? so i could contact you easily…?
God Bless thank you
ah oh i got it… i used notepad ++ 
sir thomas i had an error upon running the program importing the actor panda…it says:
Traceback(most recent call last):
File “file1.py”, line 23, in
pandaActor = Actor.Actor(“models/panda-model”,(“walk”,“models
/panda-walk”))
File “C:\Panda3D-1.6.0\direct\actor\Actor.py”, line 284, in init
AttributeError: ‘tuple’ object has no attribute ‘keys’
----------------------what does that mean? something wrong with the folder \direct\actor\Actor.py???
hey. dont call me sir^ . it sounds like i’m in my 40th or older
if you have a close look at the manual there is the line
pandaActor = Actor.Actor(“models/panda-model”,{“walk”:“models/panda-walk4”})
while ours is
pandaActor = Actor.Actor(“models/panda-model”,(“walk”,“models
/panda-walk”))
it expects a dict-type with the animations. supplied a touple. there is quite a difference between how those work,thought they look very similar. try to read a python tutorial. most explain dicts/touples etc quite well
Sir thomas, Oh im sorry hahaha!
i was just wondering… is python an OOP language? can it call buttons, captions radio buttons and etc.?
thank you… Y_Y peace
python is a fully OOP language. however. this has nothing to do with buttons and the likes.
if you are looking for gui-elements for your application read the manual chapter directGUI (which is about pandas buildin gui stuff)
http://www.panda3d.org/manual/index.php/DirectGUI
there are other ways of adding gui’s. like treeforms gui, or the this other,quite popular gui library which’s name i cant remember right now.
if you want to write something like an editor or so. you can also use gui-libraries for your os, such as wxpython or tkinter but those dont work inside the panda-window directly.
as you see. many possibilities. directGUI should be ok for most things. it looks quite ugly by default but you can make it look whatever you like it so… dont be scared by some pre-win95 grafics in buttons or frames
oh ok… that was helpful…
anyway, i was just wondering mr. thomas… i bumped in to this website :
lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/lesson02/index.php
… is there a way that python can do this? or do i have to download other compiler for GUI purposes?
My idea goes this way,.
I wanted to create the game menu. I can’t seem to pinpoint how do i start…waaa! 
Panda doesn’t (or usualy doesnt) operate with blittsurface operations. they are not supported by hardware ,thus quite slow.
you would simply use 3D objects, such as a simple quad which is textured. and if you want one image to be drawn ontop of another just add another textured quad and put it above the first one.
panda’s gui is very very flexible (even if it’s a bit tricky to use) but you can make it look like anything you can imagine (literally). you can freely mix 2d and 3d elements, animations and even post-processing effects if you really want.
i once wrote a little (and a bit crappy) direct GUI example. it’s not highly polished but it might be just enough to get you started.
http://home.arcor.de/positiveelectron/files/Tut-DirectGUI.zip
wow! your program was something… i’m trying to decode the codes you placed… hehehe… thanks mr. thomas.