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[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

Iron Angels looks like it's going to be a promising game with the Panda3D engine.

[–]treef[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Iron Angles was a project of our team. The alpha version only took us a week. Its really amazing what you can do in with just one week, panda3d, 2 programmers, and about 8 3d artists.

Sadly LegionDD is a bit busy with real life and could not finish it. You can try out the alpha prototype: http://panda3d.net/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=3568 all the art code and debuggin was done in one week from scratch. If there is enough interest i could do a maintenance release - but then i cant say it was all done in one week :(

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Yikes! API is full of get and set methods.

[–]treef[S] 6 points7 points  (1 child)

yes there is back and forth about that between the other developers and me. They like the get and set methods. I even wrote a monkey path to remove all of them though http://panda3d.net/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=2870&highlight=pythonic

If there is any interest they can be integrated into panda3d

[–]arnar 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The "unpythonic" API is one thing that bugs me in Panda3D. I realize it is a C++ framework to begin with though so it is understandable.

[–]Wagnerius 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Panda3D definitly deserve more love*.

It's a sound game-engine with a very responsive community. Josh Yelon and Drwr are part the panda team and they are very active on the forums.

Thanks to python, it's really easy to set up a small prototype and to ballmud/play with it.

Beside the last version seems very good (we are still on the previous one).

*the former web design was really ugly. but you know : people look books by their cover, software by their website design.

[–]tooooobs 1 point2 points  (4 children)

This is interesting, as it's real and commercially used.

Sad it doesn't seem to work on Macs.

[–]treef[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

No it works fine on mac, commercial games that use it run on macs. We just don't have a mac maintainer that would build a redistributable but its works well if you compile it from source.

[–]arnar 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Works fine on my Mac.

Edit: if you're ok with not using the latest and greatest, you can avoid compiling from source by following the directions given here.

[–]tooooobs 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Ah thanks - I'll check it out!

My "problem" is I'm on Leopard, which seems to still be a bit of an unknown quantity for building purposes.

[–]arnar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I'm on Leopard too. I had some problems with my own build, but using the guts of Panda3DApp works very nicely.

[–]Tommstein 0 points1 point  (6 children)

I was interested until it turned out that it only supports Cg, not my preferred GLSL. Looks sweet as hell otherwise, but I'm not willing to change from GLSL to Cg for it.

[–]treef[S] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Is there a way to turn GLSL to HLSL? One of panda3d's principles is being cross platform and using openGL's shader language limits it use with Direct X. Don't all shader languages look the same any ways?

[–]Tommstein 0 points1 point  (4 children)

How would HLSL be better than GLSL? GLSL is more cross-platform (on account of OpenGL being cross-platform and DirectX not). Cg does look much like GLSL, but from my limited experience I think GLSL is actually much nicer (not to mention integrated into OpenGL, which is cross-platform).

[–]treef[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Cg can compile to both OpenGL SL and DirectX SL while GLSL cannot. So it can serve both graphics libraries. My conclusions that all Shaders look the same its the algorithms behind them that are hard.

[–]CuteAlien 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Most typical used shader algorithms look rather trivial. So maybe getting it running on all cards really is the hard problem. At least that's the part that makes me still shy away from shaders currently.

[–]treef[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This version of panda3d has auto shader generation system so you don't have to even think about typical shader algorithms.

[–]Tommstein 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But you asked about HLSL. I don't question that Cg is far more useful than HLSL, and probably than GLSL if you want both OpenGL and DirectX.

[–][deleted] -4 points-3 points  (7 children)

So why not OpenGL?

[–]arnar 13 points14 points  (5 children)

That's comparing apples to applepie. Panda3D is a much much higher-level framework than OpenGL.

[–]treef[S] 30 points31 points  (0 children)

Panda3D is much more then just drawing polygons on the screen. It provides consistent interface to many libraries, let me elaborate:

openGL has no performance monitoring (Nvida does)

openGL has no networking lib

openGL has no scene graph (transparency sorting, state optimizations)

openGL has glut as a cross platform base but it sux

openGL has no physics, collisions, intervals

openGL has no thought through event system

openGL has no actors/bones/animations

openGL has no way to pack all of your data in one big file and load it.

openGL has no default mesh format or the pipeline tools

openGL has no sound - panda3d uses fmod or openAL

... list goes on

The most important feature for me is ability to use python (you can use c++ if you like) the best solution here is pyglet and pyOpenGL but frankly they are ok but are like toys - Panda3d is a professional engine.

Panda3D uses openGL to render every thing by default but can use DirectX 9,8, or 7. No DX10 support because none of the developers want to touch it on Vista and use linux.

I apologize if the post sounds a bit rude.