Besides the effort of developing an idea, getting the game design down to a point where it is great fun and actually producing all the code and assets we need, there's another thing we need to think about—how do we get our product into the hands of our customers? One way would of course be to just give them this huge pile of code, models, textures, sounds, and whatever else makes up our games, along with a manual for setting up the environment and dependencies. And while this is a tempting approach that spares us some work, we simply cannot do this to players who just want to play our games.

This is why we need to find a way to bundle up all the scripts and assets that make up our games and provide the end users with something along the lines of a button that says "click here to start playing".

If we make games available for download, we also want the file sizes to be small. While broadband internet connections may be fast, cheap, and widely available, costs for server traffic can easily get out of hand (and out of our budgets) if a million people happen to download our three and a half gigabytes of gaming awesomeness.

Illegal ripping and reuse of game assets does happen and is not in the best interest of game developers. Developers can make some assets free to copy and reuse, but that should be their choice. People creating nude patches or changing a game's behavior in an unintended way could cause us, as developers, some headaches. Therefore, protecting assets from misuse is an important part of game development and release.

The Panda3D SDK contains tools that provide solutions to these problems. In this chapter, we will see how we can make it easier for players to get and play our games. We will package our assets into container files. We will make our data harder to tamper with. We will make downloads faster by using data compression.