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 – adding an input manager


To illustrate how this works, we're going to take the keyboard controls out of the Cycle class, put them in a new class, and give the Cycle class access to those controls.

  1. To start with, save CycleCLass_03.py as InputManagerClass_01.py. Since we're taking pretty much all of the code we need from the Cycle class, we might as well use it as a starting point.

  2. Delete the line where we import Vec3. We don't need Vec3 for this class, so we don't need to import it.

  3. Change the class definition line to reflect our new class name: InputManager:

    class InputManager(DirectObject):
  4. Delete the first two lines in the __init__ method. We don't need to set up any variables or NodePaths, so we don't need to call setupVarsNPs(). We also don't need to add a task for this class.

  5. Delete everything below the line setKey() method. We don't need any of the class methods other than setKey(). That's all the work we need to do on the InputManager class. Go ahead and save the file...