Panda3d Engine

Hi I recently joined the community here and noticed you haven't exactly chosen an engine. I thought it might be helpful for me to show you something I found a while ago which is the Panda3d Engine.

Here's my little overview but you should do more investigation yourself.

- Panda3d is a Framework based for 3d games based on C++ and Python

-It is free for any purpose commercial or free

- It's a base for procedurally generated content which is a must for a game like thrive

-Provides professional shaders and rendering

- It can create easily installed applications (no extra downloads)

The only problem is that it would require alot of ground up work but for an open source project that can be easy to do.

i thought we were going for OGRE and a combination of C++ and Lua....

eumesmo wrote:

i thought we were going for OGRE and a combination of C++ and Lua....

Uh.. yeah. Seeing as you haven't really been part of the community I find it reasonable that you haven't been around long enough to witness the point when we decided on an engine, and we've already moved some ways away from the point where we've chosen the engine let alone decided on the title for this game. It'd take some time to completely do it all over again, meaning Bashinerox (our main coder) would have to painstakingly rethink and rewrite all those 1,000-or-so lines of code.

Actually, I.. I don't really know how far he's gotten, but I know it's past a thousand lines of code. I sort of forgot about him a few weeks after his leave of absence.

I actually heard about this engine last year, I think. The graphics shown in the gallery aren't exactly top-notch and the polycount is considerably low, but that's just in terms of graphics. I can see them fitting in 2001 or something, but now they look a bit outdated.

Oh well Ogre is probably a better decision since it has a larger community and much more contributers and yes I wasn't aware of the decision but I'm glad to here work has started.

I'm currently studying game development (as I don't want to be writing database applications the rest of my life) so this is part of the learning process in a sense.

I am writing a game engine from scratch (including the graphics engine)

Things like OGRE and Panda and Crystal space are little more than a mess of wrapper functions to directx or opengl. doing anything more than simple loading of mesh files requires writing your own code anyway (such as procedural generation of vertices)

so yeah. It started off in opengl, but it's got some limitations and whatnot (like the person that said that something he downloaded was hogging cpu, that's almost certainly 'cause it wasn't running hardware accelerated. Opengl doesn't allow you to know if you are running on graphics hardware or not. Directx does. also it uses radians instead of degrees) but now the graphics side of it is sitting on directx. Also lines of code for the game engine side of things is already well underway, a framework has been created and is being tweaked as we speak

Bashinerox wrote:

I'm currently studying game development (as I don't want to be writing database applications the rest of my life) so this is part of the learning process in a sense.

I am writing a game engine from scratch (including the graphics engine)

Things like OGRE and Panda and Crystal space are little more than a mess of wrapper functions to directx or opengl. doing anything more than simple loading of mesh files requires writing your own code anyway (such as procedural generation of vertices)

so yeah. It started off in opengl, but it's got some limitations and whatnot (like the person that said that something he downloaded was hogging cpu, that's almost certainly 'cause it wasn't running hardware accelerated. Opengl doesn't allow you to know if you are running on graphics hardware or not. Directx does. also it uses radians instead of degrees) but now the graphics side of it is sitting on directx. Also lines of code for the game engine side of things is already well underway, a framework has been created and is being tweaked as we speak

This.

If anything, this actually sounds better than OGRE/panda/whatever-we-thought-we-were-going-to-use-a-while-back, because we don't have to really worry about limitations. Thus meaning we can have awesome, likely ideal gameplay and graphics (I'm thinking Infinity: The Quest for Earth and its engine, I-Novae- image here), seeing as the engine is specially built for us. On the downside it's going to be a very very long process, but hard work does pay off.

Please correct me if I'm wrong in any way (which I think I am).

yea thats justabout it

Just wondering, but what is the engine actually being coded in?

C++

A scripting engine will be integrated a lil down the road, which'l most likely be either lua or falconpl

Bashinerox wrote:

C++

A scripting engine will be integrated a lil down the road, which'l most likely be either lua or falconpl

So at this point everything is from scratch? We're not going to save ourselves the trouble of writing a graphics engine by just including one within our main game engine.

~sciocont wrote:

Bashinerox wrote:

C++

A scripting engine will be integrated a lil down the road, which'l most likely be either lua or falconpl

So at this point everything is from scratch? We're not going to save ourselves the trouble of writing a graphics engine by just including one within our main game engine.

My point is that it isn't saving any trouble.

Bashinerox wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Bashinerox wrote:

C++

A scripting engine will be integrated a lil down the road, which'l most likely be either lua or falconpl

So at this point everything is from scratch? We're not going to save ourselves the trouble of writing a graphics engine by just including one within our main game engine.

My point is that it isn't saving any trouble.

Okay, just keeping myself up to date.

So [/thread]?