This is my first post. I haven’t used Panda3d yet, rather I’m trying to decide on what 3d engine to use. Panda has what I need, except the FMOD problem. Since I’m developing for windows, I can use DirectX and I have already created a pretty good set of classes for 3d sound and music. How easy could this be implemented into Panda3d and can Panda be compiled without the FMOD parts??? I saw a post below about this, but it never answered the question. I believe this is the only thing that makes me not choose Panda3d at this point.
You can certainly compile Panda without FMOD. (We don’t use FMOD at all at Disney; we use a different sound library called Miles Sound System. Unfortunately, Miles is also commercial, and is fairly expensive. But it does show that the sound interface layer is easily switchable.)
To compile Panda without FMOD, you will need to download the source and either use the ppremake build system (more complicated) or the makepanda build system (simpler, but more hardcoded–you might have to comment out the fmod parts in the Python build program).
You can also integrate your own sound library with Panda instead of FMOD. This involves writing a new interface layer, replacing fmodAudioManager and fmodAudioSound in the panda/src/audiotraits directory.
You’re welcome to do this and keep your work to yourself. But if you’d like to contribute your sound library to the project, I suspect it will be welcomed by other people who have similar objections with FMOD. There was a call put out on this forum some time back for volunteers who would like to do the work of integrating some other sound library with Panda, such as OpenAL, but I don’t think anyone ever stepped up.
David
I’ll have a look at it and see if I can do it easily. I don’t think anyone really wants my sound library unless they use Windows only since it is based on DX, but if I can integrate it with Panda, someone might use it.
Audiere might be nice to use with panda3d, its open source under the LGPL license. The only restriction would be that you’d have to make any changes to the source freely available.
If you’re going to use that liberary, I wouldnt mind helping out.
You can find it here:
[EDIT]
Heh better yet… Audiere already comes with python bindings ^^
I’ll have alook at that today
My code uses DX under windows. I don’t know much about python so I probably won’t be able to effectively combine panda and my code as well as I wish. Oh well. I’ll probably end up using Irrlicht for graphics and coding the rest of the “engine” since Irrlicht is more graphics than games.