Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

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progmars
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Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by progmars »

Here it is:
http://www.panda3d.org/index.php

my friend was asking me what he should start with to get into the 3d game development. Of course he prefers freeware and open source tools. I guess Ogre 3d does not fit very well - after all it is a 3D engine and not gaming engine.

Panda3d caught my eye with that Carnegie Mellon university logo. I have a good experience with their speech synthesis system festival so I thought that maybe Panda3D is worth studying a bit deeper. How do you think? Or maybe Irrlicht is better for a beginner?
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xavier
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by xavier »

Panda3d is used to make actual released products that people use (list of projects using it in the Wikipedia page for Panda3d).

Panda3d is also developed by Disney (more so than CMU). It's also a game engine, Irrlicht is not.

For someone who wants to ease into game development, Panda3d is a reasonably good starting point.
Do you need help? What have you tried?

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progmars
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by progmars »

Thanks for your comments.

I looked over at Panda message board and got some not-so-good news: it is mostly Python oriented and for someone who wants to begin getting into game dev with C++, Panda3d seems to be not as good. They admit that in C++ it is harder to begin with Panda3d then in Python :( And my friend is pretty good at C++ but knows nothing about Python. So a new engine with a new language would be a bit overwhelming to start with.

While searching I discovered that Dark Basic has turned into Dark C++ :D not exactly; I mean Dark GDK:
http://gdk.thegamecreators.com/?f=features

There are some negative comments about Dark GDK (it has some problems with shadows and stability and is unreasonably expensive for commercial use) but the killer was this one
There are rarely any tutorials online for Dark GDK and/or Dark GDK .NET, so beginners should search up DarkBASIC Professional tutorials instead and convert that code to Dark GDK.

:(

Anyway I'll look into it, maybe it is not THAT bad.

Looked also here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines
oh, they have completely messed up game and rendering engines.

Uhh, and I thought that finding a free game engine with C++ and built-in network, sound and some basic AI would be an easy task :oops:
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xavier
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by xavier »

Why not look at the Ogre Wiki for that sort of information?

The closest thing to an Ogre-based C++ game engine is probably OGE, but it's not ready-for-prime-time. For C# there is NeoAxis (not free, but relatively cheap). For C++ and not free, there is StemCell.

There are also other game engines/frameworks listed on the Ogre wiki.
Do you need help? What have you tried?

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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by PolyVox »

Maybe this will help you in your search: http://www.devmaster.net/engines/
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by jacmoe »

Do not forget IndieZen - it's what you want.
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by progmars »

Thanks a lot.
I took a look at IndieZen, really promising project, worth trying it. Now I remember, It reminds me a bit some other project Yake but IndieZen seems more serious. The only problem - the docuemntation for now is mostly empty on their trac web site.

http://www.devmaster.net/engines/ with advanced search for free C++ engines gave me some big list but mostly there were heavily restricted trial/educational versions of commercial game engines. Also some dead prjects and some with no tutorials for beginners. So left only some: Elemental Engine II and Nebula 2.

So I guess we'll try to decide between Yake and IndieZen.
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by jacmoe »

Yake seems to be pretty dead.
So take your pick between Nebula and IndieZen.
Nebula is a great engine.
IndieZen will be a great one.
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by steven »

Nebula 3 is in construction. IMO you should wait for it as Nebula 2 has very scare documentation and is not so easy to master.

The only problem is that you must follow the dev blog http://flohofwoe.blogspot.com/ to learn about the nebula 3 progresses. And wait for his occasional SDK release. Last release Apr 09 : http://flohofwoe.blogspot.com/2009/04/n ... nload.html But if you read the blog you see that there was lots of progress since April :/
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by Zervox »

I would not bet on trying stemcell, seems dead, forums last activity was in april, last developer of stemcell was in march except eugen which was in august, their contact page they list a phone number, which is not to devcell, tried calling it today and the person who answered it could say 3 things in english, hello, yes and I dont understand... they dont answer emails or evaluation requests either.
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by kutraj »

I took a look at IndieZen, really promising project, worth trying it. Now I remember, It reminds me a bit some other project Yake but IndieZen seems more serious. The only problem - the docuemntation for now is mostly empty on their trac web site.
Yake has been in development for a long time. I wonder how you judged its 'seriousness' when compared to IndieZen. Sorry, just that I've been using Yake for a bit and was a little surprised to see that.
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by jacmoe »

Looks like I was wrong when I said Yake was dead - there is progress. :)
Even though it's not progressing as fast as it used to, it still lives.
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by progmars »

kutraj wrote: Yake has been in development for a long time. I wonder how you judged its 'seriousness' when compared to IndieZen. Sorry, just that I've been using Yake for a bit and was a little surprised to see that.
Actually I judged it by some articles on the website - IndieZen developers seem a bit more seriously about game engine and game creation :D But it was just the first impression and completely non-objective.

Yes, it looks that Yake is alive (although things happen slowly). When I visited it some time ago there was much spam on their message board and no useful topics but now they are more active.
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Re: Has anyone experience with Panda3d?

Post by kutraj »

Actually I judged it by some articles on the website - IndieZen developers seem a bit more seriously about game engine and game creation :D But it was just the first impression and completely non-objective.

Yes, it looks that Yake is alive (although things happen slowly). When I visited it some time ago there was much spam on their message board and no useful topics but now they are more active.
Oh, ok.

The message board was hijacked a while back. I guess they sorted it pretty quickly. I guess they've made a version 0.8 release right now. You might want to check it out.
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