Book Image

Panda3D 1.7 Game Developer's Cookbook

Book Image

Panda3D 1.7 Game Developer's Cookbook

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Panda3D 1.7 Game Developer's Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Compressing and converting model files using pzip and egg2bam


When working with Panda3D, you will mainly encounter two kinds of files for storing models and actors. The one type of file has the extension .egg, while the other ends with a .bam filename suffix.q.

The .egg file format is intended to be a common intermediate and interchange file format. It was designed to be very easy to understand, to facilitate the development of format converters and export plugins for digital content creation tools. Files in .egg format are text-based and human-readable, which makes them easier to inspect and analyze. This also makes it possible for version tracking systems like Subversion, Perforce, or Git to efficiently store and track changes to the model data.

The big downside of the .egg model file format is file size. Storing this kind of data in a plain-text format is not very efficient and takes up a lot of storage space. Not only does this unnecessarily waste disk space, it also increases the time...