Using ppackage

Warning

This article describes a deprecated feature as of Panda3D 1.10.0.

The ppackage utility is Panda’s utility for building packages. You can also use ppackage to build a p3d file; this gives you much more control over the p3d file than packp3d’s simple interface.

To use ppackage, you must first create a pdef file, or a package definition file. This is a file that defines precisely what package(s) or p3d file(s) are to be produced, and what contents should go into each one. The syntax of the pdef file is described on the next page.

Once you have the pdef file, you can run ppackage as follows:

ppackage -i c:/output_dir myfile.pdef

The directory named with -i is the directory into which the contents of the package(s) named in the pdef file will be placed. It doesn’t have to exist before you run ppackage, but if it does already exist from a previous ppackage session, new contents will be added to it. You must eventually copy this directory to a web host to make the packages available for use; see Hosting packages, below.

As with packp3d, you must have panda3d on your path; and you can omit the panda3d prefix on Linux and Mac.

Also like packp3d, you should use the version of ppackage.p3d that is distributed with the particular version of Panda3D that you are using for development–ppackage.p3d is associated with the version of Panda3D that was used to produce it, and by default will generate packages that depend on that version of Panda3D.