The Panda3D engine was mainly designed to be controlled by Python scripts to hide away the complexities of handling and rendering a 3D game world. This allows us to concentrate on creating game scenes and gameplay without having to think about any low-level implementation issues. Many of these have already been solved by the Panda3D developers and are implemented in a whole set of libraries written in C++. When working with Python Panda3D's API nicely wraps their functionality, but we may also use these libraries directly from our own C++ code if we prefer to use this language instead of Python.
If you haven't yet, please read the recipe Configuring Visual Studio 2008 to work with Panda3D found in Chapter 1 prior to starting this one. The following steps assume you know how to get a Panda3D project started in Visual Studio 2008 or Visual C++ Express 2008. Both editions can be used for this recipe. For the sake of readability, this recipe will refer...