« Spoiled
The Pandas, They’re Everywhere!
First, a bit of link-age to one of the kookiest and coolest webcomics around, Panda Express!
Now, on with the point ;). I was discussing my desire to build one of the islands we were developing at The Writing Project before everybody lost the time and/or interest in working on it with my long-time partner-in-crime, SR388. When I mentioned building it in MAX and trying to keep the polygon count as low as possible (I’ve budgeted myself to 100,000 polys for the entire scene), he was naturally curious if I planned to do it in realtime. Of course, I am, and that’s been the goal of this project since its conception: learn to make realtime-friendly environments. He asked me if I planned on importing it into Uru, since even he’s apparently heard that such a thing is indeed now possible, and I responded that while I’d love to, I didn’t want to think about how hard it would be to import the thing into Blender and then export it from there to Uru.
So, he sent me a link to a freeware realtime engine originally developed by Disney in 2002 for one of their online games. The engine is called - of all things - Panda3D. It appears from the screenshots of projects built with it that it’s a bit basic in many areas, and probably doesn’t support pixel shaders or anything fancy like that, but as a basic 3D engine to get started with, I think it’ll be great. The screenshots also largely appear to be from projects created by students at an educational institution, so time constraints undoubtedly have an effect on the quality of the images. Even better is that it ships with an exporter to take data straight from 3DS MAX into the engine, which will make transitioning the scene into the engine much easier (I’d still LOVE to get my hands on Cyan’s Plasma tools, though…;)).
All of that, though, isn’t quite as spiffy as the fact that it, like Plasma and a few other engines out there, uses Python to interface with the C/C++ code of the engine itself, so by teaching myself how to use this engine and script with it, I’ll be leaning an important skill set. How cool’s that? :D.
In the meantime, though, I may be requesting the assistance of someone who is a bit more Python- and programming-savvy than myself to help get me started with this. I won’t have the opportunity to get started on moving things into this engine for a while yet, but anyone who’s willing to volunteer their time in advance is welcome to do so, and I appreciate any help you guys can give.