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

Adding sound effects


Our next step is to add some sound effects for the cycles' engines and weapons. Because these are sounds that are being produced by actual objects in our world, we want their volume to be dependent on how far those objects are from the camera. That will give our sound environment a more realistic feel.

Panda3D comes with a utility called Audio3DManager that makes it easy to set this up. Don't let the name confuse you, though; this isn't a new kind of AudioManager. It's actually a wrapper that modifies an existing AudioManager. Using this wrapper, we can tie a sound to an object, define an object that is the "listener", and the volume of the sound will drop as the object it's attached to gets further from the "listener".

We're going to make four new AudioManager objects that we will use for cycles. They'll be owned by the Race class because we don't really want to be creating and destroying them each time we make new cycles. Instead, we'll just pass them along from Race...