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

Importing custom classes


A class is a kind of definition. It allows us to describe a certain kind of object, and then later we can use that definition to create one, two, or even dozens of copies of that object, called instances, using the class definition.

We've already started diving into the realm of custom classes with our World class. We put the definition for that class into the same file we were running in the Windows command prompt, so we didn't need to import it to gain access to it. If it were in another file, for example WorldClass.py, we would need to use an import statement to gain access to it. That import statement would look like this:

from WorldClass import World

The from part of the statement tells Python what file to look in to find the definition of the World class we are telling it to import. For this to work, the file we're running and the file we're importing should be in the same directory. If they aren't, we would need to include a relative path from the file we're...