Book Description
Over 80 recipes for developing 3D games with Panda3D, a full-scale 3D game engine
- Dive into the advanced features of the Panda3D engine
- Take control of the renderer and use shaders to create stunning graphics
- Give your games a professional look using special effects and post-processing filters
- Extend the core engine libraries using C++
- Explained ready-to-use sample code along with plenty of screenshots for easier and quicker learning
In Detail
Panda3D is a free and open source game engine. It has been used successfully by hobbyists as well as big studios to create games ranging from quick prototypes to full-scale commercial MMOs. Panda3D makes it easy to use models, textures, and sounds to create impressive interactive experiences. With this book, you too will be able to leverage the full power of the Panda3D engine.
Panda3D 1.7 Game Developer's Cookbook will supply you with a set of recipes with step-by-step instructions to guide you to usable results quickly and take you through all the topics involved in developing games with Panda3D. First it takes a quick sweep through setting up a basic scene. Then focused articles covering advanced topics of game development carry you closer to your game development goals step by step. With each article you will be able to add more features, as the recipes guide you through getting user input from gamepads, keyboard, mouse, microphone, or even webcam, using shader effects, setting up custom render-to-texture pipelines, applying full-screen post-processing effects, adding physics with the ODE, PhysX, or Bullet physics engine, using the engine's networking capabilities with the event-driven Twisted server framework, debugging and performance profiling, and packaging your game for distribution. It will also put you in touch with other languages and technologies like C++, the Cg shading language, and the Twisted server framework.
Panda3D 1.7 Game Developer's Cookbook provides a great reference for your Panda3D game development needs and helps you to deliver impressive results more quickly and with great ease.
This book offers solutions to problems occurring during game development with Panda3D for people already familiar with the basics of Panda3D.
Table of Contents
- Panda3D 1.7 Game Developer's Cookbook
- Copyright
- Credits
- About the Author
- About the Reviewers
- www.PacktPub.com
- Preface
- 1. Setting Up Panda3D and Configuring Development Tools
- 2. Creating and Building Scenes
- Introduction
- Loading terrain
- Loading and attaching sounds to objects
- Creating a scene using C++
- Adding an additional camera
- Inspecting and modifying the scene
- Modifying the scene graph
- Moving objects based on time
- Controlling actions using intervals
- Making animations fit to intervals
- 3. Controlling the Renderer
- 4. Scene Effects and Shaders
- 5. Post-Processing and Screen Space Effects
- 6. 2D Elements and User Interfaces
- 7. Application Control
- 8. Collision Detection and Physics
- 9. Networking
- 10. Debugging and Performance
- 11. Input Handling
- Introduction
- Handling keyboard and mouse input
- Implementing an abstraction layer for supporting multiple input methods
- Handling input from an Xbox 360 controller
- Recording and simulating user input
- Reading audio data from a microphone
- Reading video data from a webcam
- Reading input data from a network
- 12. Packaging and Distribution
- 13. Connecting Panda3D with Content Creation Tools