My biggest issue when it comes to cross-platform development is distribution. Distributing for Windows is quite easy, but Linux is normally an issue. Thats mainly because of the way Linux looks for external libraries. I’ve taken a look at Panda3D and it has a few tools to aid in this little problem, but the release these tools are a part of is still in development. And yes, I’ve encountered a few issues. Panda3D 1.7.0 has a tool called pdeploy that can create an installer or self-contained executable for all supported platforms. I’ve tested this on the Looking and Gripping example bundled with the Panda3D SDK. For Linux i386 it created a DEB package, but my system runs Fedora Core which uses RPM packages. The DEB package failed to install. Windows, once again, went smoothly and I installed the package. First off, it only created a Uninstall entry in the Start menu. The second issue is when the game is started up, it downloads it’s own copy of the Panda3D runtime. It’ll do this for every game and its a time consuming affair, even more so if the user has a slow internet connection.
Even with that issue, Panda3D still remains a great game development SDK. It’s packed full of features thats hard to ignore. And comparing to others, its the easiest to find some method of distribution. I’ll look into this some more.
