API-essentials subset for beginners.

[janEntikan]

Panda3D comes with a -lot- of great functionality, but having these all at your fingertips from the get-go can make it daunting and complicated for beginners to figure out what to focus on. On the other hand it is very easy to make quite impressive games in Panda3D if you know what handful of classes and their more important methods to use. Having a separate, smaller API with just these essentials might make it easier to start using Panda3D. Most likely these would be all the classes and functions mentioned in the Programming With Panda3D section of the manual. This subset would need to be very clearly stated as such with the full API only one click away to avoid any confusion.

I've compiled a list of classes I found to be the most useful when developing games during gamejams:

ShowBase
  base.render
  base.render2d/aspect2d
  base.loader
  base.cam/base.camera
  base.accept
  base.clock
  base.win
  base.task_mgr
  base.run

NodePath
Actor
PandaNode
  Directional-/Point-/AmbientLight
  Camera
  TextNode
  Fog
  GeomNode/Geom (?)
  SequenceNode/LODNode (?)

Vec2/3/4
Point2/3/4
TranformState (?)
Texture/TextureStage
Interval/Sequence/Parallel
CollisionNode/-Solid/-Traverser/-Handler/CollideMask
CardMaker
LineSegs

The ones with (?) might be less important but I've found them very useful. I'm probably missing some obvious things.

[rdb]

Maybe this would be good material for a cheat sheet / quick reference guide?

[raytopianprojects]

I think that this would be good for a cheat sheet. I can get started on this if no one else wants to.