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 – using egg-texture-cards


The two flags mentioned earlier are the two we're going to use to create our flipbook animation.

  1. We can find egg-texture-cards.exe in the Panda3D-1.6.2/bin folder. Copy it and paste it into the BGP3D/Misc folder.

  2. Open a Windows Command Prompt and navigate it to the BGP3D/Misc folder.

  3. Type the following in and press enter:

    egg-texture-cards.exe –fps 16 –o EBoom.egg EBoom_00.png EBoom_01.png EBoom_02.png EBoom_03.png EBoom_04.png EBoom_05.png EBoom_06.png EBoom_07.png EBoom_08.png EBoom_09.png EBoom_10.png EBoom_11.png EBoom_12.png EBoom_13.png EBoom_14.png EBoom_15.png

What just happened?

We've just made an egg file that contains a flipbook animation of our 16 images. Go ahead and open the egg file to take a look.

Note

It's important to note that the polygons created with egg-texture-cards don't receive lighting terribly well when placed in the 3D scene graph.

We can turn off lighting for them by calling on setLightOff() on the NodePath to solve that problem. That's why the explosions we used in this book were in bam files instead of egg files. They were prepped by being loaded and having setLightOff() called on them. Then, they were saved into bam files to retain that NodePath attribute.