Building and hosting your own packages
Warning
This section describes a deprecated feature as of Panda3D 1.10.0.
Putting your entire application into a p3d file is a useful way to distribute small applications, but there are times when you need to distribute your code a little more intelligently. Large applications may need to be divided into several smaller pieces for download at runtime; or you might have a large C++-based library that you want to make available to several different applications, without having to re-download it for each one.
For these purposes, you should consider using packages. A package has several advantages over a simple p3d file:
It can be downloaded on demand, either automatically at startup, or during runtime if desired.
One package can be downloaded once and shared by multiple p3d files.
Packages will be cached in the user’s Panda3D directory. (p3d files, on the other hand, are saved in the browser cache only, where there may be less space.)
Patching can be used to automatically update a package with a new version, so that your users need download only the incremental changes, instead of having to completely redownload the package at every change.
There can be a different version of a package for each hardware/OS platform that you wish to support. This is the easiest way to provide multiplatform support with C++-based applications.
On the other hand, setting up packages requires a little more work than simply building a p3d file.