Distributing Panda3D Applications

Panda3D provides a set of tools that make it easy to compile Python applications using Panda3D into a self-contained executable file, which can then be hosted on a website or store front for distribution to end-users.

These tools are unique among packaging tools in that they will automatically produce binaries for Windows, Linux and macOS. You do not need to own those systems in order to compile a binary for them. In the future, we will extend this list as we add support for more platforms.

Furthermore, they are able to automatically pull in a special optimized version of Panda3D that is lighter and faster than the builds on the website, since they are built without debugging aids and error messages enabled. Building Panda3D from source code is therefore not necessary to create an optimized build.

The old system that shipped with Panda3D 1.9 and operated on .p3d files is no longer supported. It was too complex to use and maintain, required special builds of Panda3D, and did not work with Python 3.

These tools are implemented as plug-ins to setuptools, which is the standard build system for packaging Python applications. You can read more about it in its documentation, but the basic idea is that you create a setup.py or setup.cfg file describing the application with a list of files that need to be compiled into the distribution. Then, setup.py is run with a command that tells it what plug-in to invoke to do the appropriate packaging operation.

Panda3D adds two new commands to setuptools:

build_apps: compile the application into one or more stand-alone executable files

bdist_apps: runs build_apps, then packages the compiled executables into various archives and installers for distribution

Thus, the basic steps to deploy a Panda3D application are:

  1. Create a setup.py or setup.cfg file for your application

  2. Execute python setup.py bdist_apps

  3. Upload the resulting files (e.g. zip, tar.gz, exe) to a store front or web site

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