Note: pdeploy is a new tool. This means that it is likely to contain bugs and therefore you shouldn't rely on it.

It is possible to distribute your p3d file as a fully self-contained application. You can use your p3d file to generate a custom installer, and distribute this installer to your users. The installer will produce a fully-self-contained application that doesn't require the user to install the Panda3D plugin separately. The user never needs to know that he/she is running Panda3D at all.

This can be done using the pdeploy utility. It has the ability generate a graphical installer for every known platform, so you will never need to boot a different operating system just to generate an installer for that platform. However, note that pdeploy requires an internet connection to run.

For information about command-line options, you can invoke:

pdeploy -h

This will print the help text for pdeploy, along with information about every supported command-line option.

Generating an installer

You can create a graphical installer for your game using a command similar to:

pdeploy -N "My Cool Game" -v 1.0.0 myCoolGame.p3d installer

This will create various subdirectories in the current directory, one for every platform, containing graphical installers that install your game. (You can specify a custom output directory with the -o option.) The Panda3D libraries are not packed with the installer, but they will be automatically downloaded when the game is ran for the first time.

If you want to create a fully self-contained installer that does not require an internet connection to run, append -s to the command-line options. The resulting installers will also contain the Panda3D libraries and will be larger. Also, pdeploy will take a much longer time to finish, as it will need to download the Panda3D libraries for every known platform.

By default, pdeploy will generate an installer for every known platform. You can also specify a custom set of platforms, by adding the -P option followed by the platform name. You may repeat -P as many times as necessary. To generate an installer only for the current platform, use the -c option. If -c is provided, any -P options are ignored.

You can also let pdeploy pass custom tokens to the application, as described in Advanced object tags. You can simply pass tokens to pdeploy using the -t token=value option, and you may repeat the -t option as many times as you need.

When running the resulting game, the window will be placed in the center of the screen, unless explicitly overridden in the application. You can pass a custom height and width for the window using the 'width' and 'height' tokens.

Note: Even though most of the informational command-line arguments are optional, it is highly recommended to specify as many of them as possible, to provide the most accurate description for your application.

Example

This fictional example shows how to use pdeploy and commonly-used options. (You may want to omit the -P options to generate for every platform.) This is one command, line breaks are merely added to avoid this manual page from stretching.

pdeploy -n coolgame -N "My Cool Game" -v 1.0.0 -a com.cool_company -A "Cool Company"
-e packager@cool_company.com -l "Modified BSD License"
-l bsd.txt -t width=800 -t height=600
-P linux_amd64 -P win32 -P osx_i386 -s coolGame.p3d installer

Generating a standalone executable

Instead of a graphical installer, pdeploy also has the ability to generate a standalone executable. It works similar to tools like py2exe, but is designed to embed .p3d games. This will not require a Panda3D installation to run - instead, when running it, it will automatically download and install the Panda3D libraries. The pdeploy command-line looks like this:

pdeploy myCoolGame.p3d standalone

Like when generating an installer, you can use the -c and P options to specify a custom set of platforms to generate for, -o to specify a custom output directory, and -t to pass custom tokens.

Note that the resulting executable will have some dependencies, such as the X11 libraries on Unix, and the Visual C++ 2008 runtime on Windows. It will not run if those libraries are not present on the system. You should use the "installer" option, as explained above, for a fully self-contained installer that contains the dependent libraries.