Packages

There are no technical differences between packages other than the types of content they're allowed to define or replace. A 'main' package is a package which defines symbols, variables, and other attributes that scripts will have access to. Character attributes, skill types, and other such things are defined in main packages. Mod packages is content that extends and adds additional content to a particular main package. It is required to load a main package, and it is optional to load mod packages.

Filesystem

The filesystem is a wrapper of Panda3D's virtual filesystem. When loading the platform a default main asset folder is always loaded. The user must supply via the argument -p or --package a single or multiple packages which hold game data.

Example: python .\source\ --package C:\Users\Bryan\Documents\example-package ...

https://docs.panda3d.org/1.10/cpp/reference/panda3d.core.VirtualFileSystem

Folder structure

The virtual file system follows the posix standard and uses forward slashes using / as root.

/
  - main-assets
    + models/
    + animations/
    + textures/
    + materials/
      gamepackage.json
  - example-package
    + models/
    + animations/
    + textures/
    + materials/
      gamepackage.json

models - .egg, .glTF, or .glb files containing mesh information
textures - .png, or .bmp images
materials - definitions for non-albedo textures
animations - .glTF or .glb files containing armatures and animation sequences

Gamepackage.json

Every package is required to have this file located at the base directory of the mod. The file contains the name, description, version, and other information about the package.

{
	"name": "main-assets",
	"version": "0.1-alpha",
    "type": "mod"
}

Loading package

When starting the platform the argument -p or --package should be given a list of folders to be mounted. Each package is loaded into a respective /<packagename> folder.

Finding assets

There are two ways to supply paths. Paths that start with $/ mean use the first asset found and will check starting from the top of the list (last package supplied) to the bottom. This can be used to allow assets to be 'replaced' by other packages.

If the path is instead <packagename>/mymodel.glb, than it will only look in that package for the given resource and not attempt to search other packages. In this way you can prevent other packages from replacing an asset.

Assets that can't be found will return a default error asset.