Monday, November 24, 2008

YouTube Vids of Older Stuff

Took me long enough, but I've finally gotten around to uploading some video of Melody's Musette and Rabbit-Proof Fencing, two projects that comprised the majority of my work back at ETC-Adelaide.

Melody's Musette is a game whose core concept is synchronicity, tying the music and gameplay events together. Rabbit-Proof Fencing is a humorous look at introduced species in Australia. Puns abound.

Both of these games were made with Panda3D.

I've embedded them below, or you can simply head to my YouTube channel to check them out.

Melody's Musette Stage Two Gameplay


Melody's Musette Stage Three Gameplay


Rabbit-Proof Fencing, Full Game

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Panda3D Macintosh Install Script

Nutshell: Click here to download a Python script to install Panda3D from scratch. Read on for more deets.

Panda3D is a great game engine, especially for rapid-prototyping, but for Mac users it can be a bit frustrating being a second-class citizen. While independent developers are creating very useful distributions (like Hypnos's awesome p3dapp) there are no official builds, and installing from source is no easy task.

Edalytical's very helpful guide, Building Panda3D in OS X Leopard, has fallen out of date. Using it as a base, I've created a Python script that will install Panda3D from source, and can even download and install Panda3D's two major dependencies, MacPorts and the Cg Toolkit. Its only dependency is Leopard Developer Tools (you know, Xcode and the like).

Simply download the script from the Game Sketching project's downloads page. By default, it will download/compile/install Panda3D. You can add the options +macports and +cg to download/install those dependencies. See the source or read below for the usage info:

pandaAutoInstall.py [noex] [(+|-)option]
option is one of 'uninstall', 'download', 'compile', 'remove', 'test', 'macports', 'cg', 'announce'
To install everything: pandaAutoInstall.py +all
To just install Panda3D: pandaAutoInstall.py
To uninstall: pandaAutoInstall.py +uninstall


Bug reports, positive/negative feedback and success/failure stories are welcome!