pandemonium_engine_docs/01_about/introduction.md

Introduction

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Welcome to the official documentation of Pandemonium Engine, the free and open source community-driven 2D and 3D game engine! Behind this mouthful, you will find a powerful yet user-friendly tool that you can use to develop any kind of game, for any platform and with no usage restriction whatsoever.

This page gives a broad presentation of the engine and of the contents of this documentation, so that you know where to start if you are a beginner or where to look if you need info on a specific feature.

Before you start

The Tutorials and resources ( doc_community_tutorials ) page lists video tutorials contributed by the community. If you prefer video to text, those may be worth a look.

In case you have trouble with one of the tutorials or your project, you can find help on the various Community channels ( doc_community_channels ), especially the Pandemonium Discord community, Q&A, and IRC.

About Pandemonium Engine

A game engine is a complex tool, and it is therefore difficult to present Pandemonium in a few words. Here's a quick synopsis, which you are free to reuse if you need a quick writeup about Pandemonium Engine.

Pandemonium Engine is a feature-packed, cross-platform game engine to create 2D
and 3D games from a unified interface. It provides a comprehensive set of
common tools, so users can focus on making games without having to
reinvent the wheel. Games can be exported in one click to a number of
platforms, including the major desktop platforms (Linux, macOS, Windows)
as well as mobile (Android, iOS) and web-based (HTML5) platforms.

Pandemonium is completely free and open source under the permissive MIT
license. No strings attached, no royalties, nothing. Users' games are
theirs, down to the last line of engine code. Pandemonium's development is fully
independent and community-driven, empowering users to help shape their
engine to match their expectations. It is supported by the `Software
Freedom Conservancy ( https://sfconservancy.org )` not-for-profit.

For a more in-depth view of the engine, you are encouraged to read this documentation further, especially the Step by step ( toc-learn-step_by_step ) tutorial.

About the documentation

This documentation is continuously written, corrected, edited, and revamped by members of the Pandemonium Engine community. It is edited via text files in the reStructuredText ( http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/rest.html ) markup language and then compiled into a static website/offline document using the open source Sphinx ( http://www.sphinx-doc.org ) and ReadTheDocs ( https://readthedocs.org/ ) tools.

Note: You can contribute to Pandemonium's documentation by opening issue tickets or sending patches via pull requests on its GitHub source repository ( https://github.com/Relintai/pandemonium_engine-docs ), or translating it into your language on Hosted Weblate ( https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/pandemonium-engine/pandemonium-docs/ ).

All the contents are under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0 ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ )) license, with attribution to "Péter Magyar and the Pandemonium community, and Juan Linietsky, Ariel Manzur and the Godot community".

Organization of the documentation

This documentation is organized in five sections with an impressively unbalanced distribution of contents – but the way it is split up should be relatively intuitive:

• The sec-general section contains this introduction as well as information about the engine, its history, its licensing, authors, etc. It also contains the doc_faq.
• The sec-learn section is the raison d'être of this documentation, as it contains all the necessary information on using the engine to make games. It starts with the Step by step ( toc-learn-step_by_step ) tutorial which should be the entry point for all new users.
• The sec-tutorials section can be read as needed, in any order. It contains feature-specific tutorials and documentation.
• The sec-devel section is intended for advanced users and contributors to the engine development, with information on compiling the engine, developing C++ modules or editor plugins.
• The sec-community section gives information related to contributing to engine development and the life of its community, e.g. how to report bugs, help with the documentation, etc. It also points to various community channels like IRC and Discord and contains a list of recommended third-party tutorials outside of this documentation.
• Finally, the sec-class-ref is the documentation of the Pandemonium API, which is also available directly within the engine's script editor. It is generated automatically from a file in the main source repository, therefore the generated files of the documentation are not meant to be modified. See doc_updating_the_class_reference for details.

In addition to this documentation you may also want to take a look at the various Pandemonium demo projects ( https://github.com/Relintai/pandemonium_engine-demo-projects ).

Have fun reading and making games with Pandemonium Engine!