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