About

Welcome to this “Beginner’s Tutorial for Panda3D”!

This tutorial will hopefully teach you the basics of creating a game using the Panda3D engine, from the fundamentals to building a distributable version.

(The GitHub repository for this tutorial can be found here. If you encounter any issues, or want to suggest any improvements, you can file them in the issue-tracker or pull-request-tracker found there!)

Table of Contents

• Start Here
  • Information on what the tutorial does and doesn’t teach; a summary of what’s taught; information on the reference-code for the tutorial-game, and where to find it; and information on where to get the assets used.
• Lesson 1: Hello World
  • First steps in running a Panda3D window
• Lesson 2: Making a Scene
  • How Panda structures its scene; the basics of loading and manipulating models; and the loading and playing of animated models.
• Lesson 3: A Bit of Shading
  • Using lights; and the automatic shader-generator
• Lesson 4: Taking Control
  • The basics of taking input
• Lesson 5: Our Next Task
  • Using tasks to update the game
• Lesson 6: Bumping into Things
  • Simple collision-detection
• Lesson 7: Our Game’s Objects
  • Making classes for the player and an enemy
• Lesson 8: It’s a Trap!
  • Collision-events; and a sliding-trap enemy
• Lesson 9: Mask-erade
  • Collision ray-casting; the “queue” collision-handler; and restricting what may collide with what
• Lesson 10: Lasing Around
  • Taking mouse-input; and using the “Plane” object to find a 3D point for a 2D mouse-position
• Lesson 11: An Enemy Attacks!
  • Giving the “Walking Enemy” a “melee” attack
• Lesson 12: Visibly Healthy
  • Showing basic images and text on-screen; shading a character via a colour-scale; and adding feedback to hits
• Lesson 13: Endless Enemies
  • Game-logic for placing traps, spawning enemies, updating the various objects, and handling dead enemies
• Lesson 14: Sound Decisions
  • Sound and music
• Lesson 15: Your Menu, Sir
  • Constructing menus with DirectGUI
• Lesson 16: Packed with a Neat Little Bow
  • Building a distributable version of a game

To begin with, I recommend that you start here