Book Image

Panda3D 1.6 Game Engine Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Panda3D 1.6 Game Engine Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Panda3D is a game engine, a framework for 3D rendering and game development for Python and C++ programs. It includes graphics, audio, I/O, collision detection, and other abilities relevant to the creation of 3D games. Also, Panda3D is Open Source and free for any purpose, including commercial ventures. This book will enable you to create finished, marketable computer games using Panda3D and other entirely open-source tools and then sell those games without paying a cent for licensing. Panda3D 1.6 Game Engine Beginner's Guide follows a logical progression from a zero start through the game development process all the way to a finished, packaged installer. Packed with examples and detailed tutorials in every section, it teaches the reader through first-hand experience. These tutorials are followed by explanations that describe what happened in the tutorial and why. You will start by setting up a workspace, and then move on to the basics of starting up Panda3D. From there, you will begin adding objects like a level and a character to the world inside Panda3D. Then the book will teach you to put the game's player in control by adding change over time and response to user input. Then you will learn how to make it possible for objects in the world to interact with each other by using collision detection and beautify your game with Panda3D's built-in filters, shaders, and texturing. Finally, you will add an interface, audio, and package it all up for the customer.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Panda3D 1.6 Game Engine
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – loading the terrain


  1. Add these two lines to the World class __init__ method:

  2. Save this as chp02_03.py and run it. This window will pop up:

  3. This doesn't look quite right, does it? Move the mouse over the Panda3D window, hold down the left mouse button, and drag down. The view will change to something like the following:

What just happened?

Congratulations! We're looking at our first 3D model loaded into Panda3D.

Let's talk a bit about the code we used to do this, starting with the following line:

self.track = loader.loadModel("../Models/Track.egg")

We have a couple of things going on here. First, we are creating a new variable, called "track". By creating it as "self.track" we are making it an attribute of the World class. Remember back to earlier when we made the World class and we told the __init__ method to accept a variable called "self", and how we mentioned that would let us interact with the instance of the World class from within the __init__ method? That's exactly what...