Second Review of the engine

I went back to Panda to do a game of small scale, so I have a more objective review this time.

Features:
Panda3D is a game engine, it's more than just graphics. It has integrated physics(panda and ODE), network, audio, decent AI. It even include tools to pack and distribute your games. Even an installer packaging using NSIS is included. All you have to do is focus on coding your game. The only thing that Panda 3D needs is a full featured level editor (it's still in development).

Ease of Use & Performance:
I chose to combine them for a reason. With Panda3D you can make your games with either Python or C++. With Python you have ease of use of a high level, since the language is so much more readable and easier than C++ and with few lines of code you get many things up and running. The trade-off of the ease of use is the performance. While it's not bad because the engine is written in c++, using python reduces some performance and you might have to do some tweaks to improve it if you have high scale, dynamic game.
The second option is to use C++ to solve the performance issue, and the difference is noticeable. However, the trade-off is that is not as easy to use, because you can't debug much in c++ and you might have problems using other IDEs than Visual C++ / C++ Express.
One issue is the Panda3D physics system, while good, it's not 100% reliable when you use gravity, you can use ODE or other wrapper for python, but they're not as full featured as the C++ originals.

Support:
I'm not saying that the support is bad. The documentation is good and the tutorials are a good help. The API is ok and the forums offer support.
However, compared to other engines, the documentation is lacking in showing what you can do. PyOgre has better documentation and both are using python.
The community is active, but, knowing that the engine has been used in many commercial games, I find it not as active as I expected, compared to other engines

Pandas everywhere

Pro's - Free!! Robust. Good community. Lots of tutorials. I found it easy to use.

Con's - Your not going to get the latest features out of this. Don't expect CryEngine graphics or features.

No level editor.

Sheer Awesomness

I enjoy programming as a hobby in my spare time amongst work, uni etc. I have previously done a lot of C + OpenGL programming, writing my own game engine over about 2 years. In it's final stages, this engine had 12000+ lines of code, once compressed/minified.

A while ago, I came across Panda3D. Ever since following their online 'hello world' tutorial in the manual, I have been sold out to Panda. In less than 100 lines, the Panda3D engine could do more than I had spent 2 years and 12000 lines coding.

Admittedly, the Panda3D engine is a much higher level API than OpenGL, as is Python when compared to C, however the simplicity and logical outlay of the engine still defys anything I've worked with before.

It's pythonic works-out-of-the-box functionality is another feature that really impresses me. Reading the online Forum I came across some code another user had written in a different OS, different environment to me. I expected to have to spend at least 1 night fixing compatibility issues just to get the code to work, but after copying and pasting, it worked, literally, within seconds.

The last feature I want to mention is it's wide-ranging support for industry standard extensions. The engine comes pre-packaged with support for many extensions, but if you need something, just check the forum, users regularly post code they have implemented that wraps around professional quality 3rd party libraries. Sound? Panda3D supports FMOD, OpenAL and Miles. Physics? Try ODE, nVidia PhysX, Bullet and Newton! Shading? nVidia Cg is ready to go. Multiple Graphics API's? You bet!

To quote the panda himself, it's sheer awesomness. 5/5

Panda3D

As I write this review (2008-10-07) the engine details are horribly outdated, skim the Panda3D manual for details.

Pros:

The engine is capable to transform more or less any space in any other space. That is extremmly really helpfull if you like to write your own shaders.

There is an exporter Blender. Unfortunately it does not support all the features, Panda3D supports, although Blender is able to provide this informations. Two examples: 1. Blender has the ability to create more than one animation per object. But with the Blender exporter you have to define the start frame and end frame for every animation. 2. The exporter is not able to export binormals, that may be usefull to normal mapping. IMO the source is unreadable but at least it's stable.

The edit, compile, run cycle is extremly short. I personally use only a simple text editor and never had any problem restarting the engine ten times per minute.

If you look a bit closer at the code base you can see that there is an enormous amount of C++ and Python code. Nevertheless I had only some crashs on rare occasions, and most often only on one PC, therefore it is more likely that the graphic driver has bugs.

The engine supports per pixel lighting and some per pixel effects like normal mapping and glow. This support is enabled through a so called AutoShader Generator. Based on the fixed function properties of a node, a per pixel shader is generated (See cons for more details).

There is a mediocre manual, a reference manual (although the most written word is maybe "undocumented") and as a last resort there are some samples. IMO the samples are extremmly good because they show you better what the engine can handle, and some samples show you some andvanced features you can do with shaders.

Supported Sound Libraries are FMOD, OpenAL and Miles.

Beside the intergrated basic physic classes, ODE is supported.

You get a damn good community that answers you more or less every stupid question you may ask.

Cons:

There is a GUI, but is not suited to create some high end GUIs. Better think of it only as a possible starting point.

The engine was written when fixed function GPUs were state of the art. That does not mean that the engine has no shader support. It only means that you don't get very good support for shaders. In the current release it is e.g. impossible to get the same FPS if you replace the fixed function pipeline with a simple shader (only transformation no lighting or textures). Panda3D is not slow (in fact I have done some tests on my own, and Panda3D was more or less every time faster than other well known Open Source 3D engines).

It is not possible to extend the shader generator. If anyone likes to add a new lighting model, it's impossible to extend it from Python. One needs to modify the source directly or subclass it with C++.

No support for geometry shaders or other newer features like texture arrays.

The big players behind Panda3D (Disney and CMU) currently don't care about some newer features, modern 3D engines have. E.g. there is no shadow caster, that can be intergrated into any application.

Finally:

I like to write here a big WARNING.

Panda3D ist not a toy. Again and again new people arrive who only understand a single bit of Python or have heard the word 3D, but don't know what 3D coordinates are for. A lot of people write here, that Panda3D is easy. Yes, it is maybe the easiest 3D engine around, but that does not mean that a 3D engine is simple by definition. Please read the fu..ing samples because they are really helpfull, before you start asking questions on the forum. Thank you.

Only for use with Python

This engine is only for use with Python - there are no documents explaining how to use it with C/C++, and no discussions on the forum about it, meaning you would have to sift through the vast number of headers and try and work out what to do.

Unfortunately the headers aren't really detailed enough to help. You could look through the source too, but why spend the extra time doing that ?

It looks good, but unless your into Python, then you can forget it.

Hard to start...

Panda is very hard to even start, but if you do then you'll know that programming in Panda is very simple based on their fact and the fact that I've seen the code myself and seems easy enough to programming. To me learning to program is easier from a book with lots of tutorials then online ones. I don't know why, but this open source project is very promising they answer you quickly and on time as well. To me I had a hard time even starting my code but I found an easier way which I could just drag the py file into the ppython exe and it works like a charm. so far... to be honest I'm changing my ratings better. Panda could use a book on this and that way it can be easier for some of us that way i can look at the book and my work at the same time. That way i won't have to go to the internet all the time scrounging for tutorials or waiting for help. Panda can use some more physics and collision and a freeware sound system that way we don't have to pay them much money just to sell our product unless you don't mind paying 100 bucks for an indie liscence for FMOD.

Panda3d

Very easy to use Game/Graphics/Sound Engine. Python is preferred language of choice, which makes writing code even easier. Community is helpful when you have questions about features. Panda3d is a scene graph engine and has many of the features you would expect.

The best for Python

Taking into account that Python is meant to be a easy-to-learn programming language and Panda3D is a Easy-to-implement-Python 3D Engine, the combination allows one to achieve great success.
Fully recommendable between other 3D Engine choices for python and recommendable for C++ developers too.

Quite an interesting engine

Brief history: Been programming C++ for ~20 years, Python for ~8, used Ogre before and created my own engine around it.

It has quite a fascinating selection of built in features. It is interested just how many optimizations they have made, a prime example is 'flatten', which optimizes and reduces part of the scene tree. It was designed for real-world use, initially by Disney, and it is currently still in heavy use and development by multiple commercial and open source developments.

The features, being made more for the 'real world' are exceedingly functional, but for individual components, Ogre does have more features for rendering, and that can be extended to the other components as well, but it is actually not all that difficult to enhance it yourself either.

Contrary to common usage, the C++ documentation is a little lacking compared to the Python documentation, and many objects and patterns only exist on the Python side, so it is quite obvious that it is really designed for Python use with C++ to be an extension mechanism when speed is required.

To date, no crash or odd rendering glitch that was not my own obvious fault, I cannot say that about other systems that I have used, and I am doing some rather unique things in this one.

The whole Python interface does have a little 'swig'-caused crud on it (like a few destructor functions that should not be necessary on just a couple of classes), but overall is nicely well made and is nicely documented. The lack of real Python doc-help on the calls and classes is a bit of an irritant (due to IDEs pulling their documentation from those), and that is my main grief with that (hence the 4 on ease of use, the lack of proper docstrings is the cause).

Support is primarily forum based, excellent there. However they also have an IRC channel (usually well filled), when the knowledgeable people are there then it is quite useful, but tend to go missing for days, and the other people do not have quite the knowledge level to make up for it (yet).

Still not talked about a great many of its features (of which they are extremely numerable), and they all have a place and purpose, not just put in for fluff.

Overall, this is actually quite an amazing engine, even building my own meshes in code is surprisingly simple. Very well recommended.

My engine of choice.

I've explored Irrlicht, Ogre, Cube, Torque, and more over the past few years. Panda3d has been the best solution for me by far. To explain my rating in greater detail.

This is a complete game and simulation engine with a very rich feature set, not just a 3d renderer. Its still a good render with very easy to use advanced shaders and rendering effects, but there are still more features than you can shake a stick at. It may not have been so in the past but this engine has been maturing for a long time now.

The ease of use is just unparalleled in my experience. Greater even than Torque which had great scripting abilities, a built in console, a built in editor, and a very easy to manipulate scene graph. Torque's failing however was in the assumptions it made about gameplay, and the way all of its features were entangled in the c++ code, making it a real headache to improve on or replace any aspect. Panda3d makes no assumptions about your game that would put any obstructions in your path, while at the same time letting you rapidly and easily tap into its feature set. Also python really can't be beat for scripting, and Panda3d applications can be written entirely in python without appearing to hide the other half of the logic in the engine.

The stability is flawless in my experience. Even your own fatal mistakes will trigger very explicit exceptions. The performance is good and comparable to other engines. It has great optimization tools included. The engine makes good use of threading, but I found it a bit tricky to push tasks I wrote in python into other threads and track performance across multiple threads.

The documentation is fantastic, and if you have any doubts just look at the manual alone http://www.panda3d.org/manual/index.php/Main_Page. Make no mistake however, this is a python game engine with c++ speed behind. The c++ API is pretty clear, straight forward, and well documented, but it doesn't compare to the python interface. The c++ side is simple to add new features to, but I think Panda3d really excels if you plan to do most of your development in python. If you're a c++ addict Panda3d is a worthy contender, but may or may no be your first choice.

Oh and its free even for commercial games thanks to its very generous BSD license.

Reliable, a breeze to start developing.

Panda's main strength is definitely its ease of use. The fact that it's geared towards Python should already imply that, but the engine itself just makes sense. Plus, the documentation is really good, so there's no frustrating learning curve. Now, graphics and performance-wise, it's not that special, although it has been used in several commercial games. All in all, it's a great engine for hobbyists who just want to make something without too much of a hassle.

Panda3D book

For anyone having difficulties in understanding the manual, you could give these 2 books on Panda3D a shot :
https://www.packtpub.com/panda3d-16-game-engine-beginners-guide/book
https://www.packtpub.com/panda3d-17-game-developers-cookbook/book

And there is the 1st and only IDE geared towards python and Panda3D, rendered and empowered by Panda3D, to ease my pain, created by me (>.<) :
http://www.panda3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3875

LOL... and good luck !

Fantastic Starting Ground for 3D and Python

Combining a somewhat easy to learn language (Python) and a well supported 3D engine backed by a fantastic community, you get Panda3D. Now like most reviews above one must have an understanding of Python (more or less) and a will (and a hell of a lot of patience) to learn 3D. I recommend having a good firm grasp of your math classes before starting to do any serious programming. By math I mean trig, geometry, maybe even some Calculus.

The community on the Panda forums is nothing but outstanding. It may take 3 days for an answer but when you do get an answer it is what you are looking for and their are plenty of knowledgable forum members to help you!

Okay enough about the good now the cons because everything has cons - this will be from a technical standpoint

1. Some advanced features that are lacking in the engine - although you can't achieve Unreal Engine like quality from Panda nor can use utilize the latest and greatest shading techniques, what Panda does offer is enough for a starting level game. Disney and CNU will probably update the engine to have these capabilities when they make a game that requires them but as of right now don't look for anything too 'fancy' in terms of shader variety and different rendering techniques. If you want the latest and greatest use DirectX or OpenGL (you will have the most control but both are FAR more complex to utilize than Panda)
2. Python and Panda. Yes python is built using C++ and python is the scripting language that controls it but never the less it will still suffer a slight performance degradation as compared to static compiled languages. Some may argue this point but as someone who programs mathematical simulations a lot, I have personally compared Python and C++ together and when you are doing intensive calculations YOU WILL see a difference. Needless to say, Panda is again, great for your basic to intermediate stuff. If your into heavy duty simulation however things may get tricky.
3. Your 3D models and such. Blender is free but coming from Maya and 3DS Max I was hard pressed to learn the interface is quirky. This one complication does not affect my rating on the engine however I believe a well integrated pipeline does affect ones opinion. For example, Disney uses Maya so naturally they have almost full support for Autodesk Maya and all the tutorials and examples stem from Maya and it can be argued that this program can utilize more features of Panda than the other 3D modeling program options. Maya is VERY expensive and most people will flock to Blender and this is okay BUT (and this can be backed up by the forum) Blender and Chicken (the exporter used to convert .blend to .egg) is somewhat iffy at times and only supports a limited number of options provided by Panda and you basically have to jump through hoops and climb several ladders before you can make your model work in Panda (this is compared to the experience between Maya and Blender and yes I have used both!)

Summary:

Apples for Apples this engine is great for starting in 3D. For your high end stuff you may want to look elsewhere. If your very advanced (as in you can write your own shaders) you will want to look elsewhere as well as its near impossible to add your own to Panda.

Easy for beginners &amp; excellent support

as the title says, i found this engine very easy to use.
The support is excellent in the forums, they respond quick and mostly in a helpful manner.

The setup of a panda3d Release version is very easy.
If you want to setup a Debug version then you will most likely encounter some problems that in my opinion could be handled better. (missing libraries, need to be downloaded and compiled by yourself, which is not to be classified as "works out of the box" anymore). But then again the forums offer nice and quick help for this.

The manual is kept in a way to support both python and c++, while the examples and tutorials are mostly in python (which is a bit annoying for c++ developers).

There is other users who are trying to get all samples converted to c++ so there might be light at the end of the tunnel in near future (?).

Overall I would definitly recomend this engine.

A perfect engine

I tried many other engines, and this was my choice.

First point: it's an *engine*. If you want to commit yourself on the game aspects (and not on the lower - technical - ones), this is the best choice, because it provides all the tools you need.

It isn't a subsystem, a middleware, it gives you all the stuff. Many other "engines" gives you only subsystems, so you need to code all the remaing stuff yourself.

It offers 3d and 2d graphics, shaders support, GUI, postprocessing effects, terrains, particles, multithreading, physics, networking, audio, AI, and many tools for performance tuning. It has very important tools for profiling (this is fundamental for serious projects), and other tools such as model viewers, editors (particles, level editor, ...).

The engine is very fast (the core is developed in C++) and also the developing of games is very fast (you can develop in Python, so you can script games). However, if you are C++ programmers, C++ support for the "client side" is there, and they're removing the gap between C++ and Python as "client" languages (without lowering Python support).

A very important feature is that you can deploy your games with their browser plugin, so you can also reach web users. And it also provides tools to build installers - so you can easily deploy your games (this is very useful because make games that run on many system is very difficult).

The engine is also going to be more modern: if you check on their project site they are going to support newer releases of DirectX and OpenGL.

It supports a smooth pipeline to import your assets into the engine.

The documentation is great: it's well-structured and cover all the aspects you need to know. If the documentation is not sufficient, there is a wonderful community support.

Great Engine, Very Easy to Use

Python is a fantastic language, and this is a fantastic game engine to complement it. It is incredibly simple to use, and beginners with basic Python knowledge should have no trouble accomplishing a lot in very little time. Add to that the fact that it's actively maintained by Carnegie Mellon University (as opposed to a team of a dozen guys that could theoretically get a new job/get sick/die/lose interest/etc. at any moment), and is being used by Disney, so there is virtually no chance that development will stop at any time in the near future.

it's in python!

what can i say, it's a complete game engine that does it's rendering in c++ and game logic in python so you get the best of both worlds! Fast performance and, even more important, a fast development cycle.

Great Engine!

Great Engine but I moved on to Unity3d.
I really liked Panda3d, it was better then alot of engines and I used it for a while, but now that unity 3.0 is comeing out I switched over.

excellent for both experts and start-ups

I've read about most engines featured here as well as in other directories.
I've installed about 10 engines, both paid and free.
For now I've stopped at Panda, and it's probably a good call. Time is to tell.

If you are a hobyst programmer with some experience in any language, if you want to get started with the inner-workings of a game-engine and focus on design and concept rather than selling a mmortspg opera, if you want to see results in the first day of effort and be able to have a game prototype done in less than a week, then Panda3D is for you.

Also, Panda is a great opportunity to learn python, a thing I always planned but never got to it.
If you are looking for features, be advised that Panda3d has a HUGE list of additional features that are not featured on their website. To name a couple: integrated AI library, support for 3D goggles.

Panda 3D from a beginner

I have only recently started looking at programming. I am a 3D artist, and using Blender as my modeling suite, I naturally gravitated towards Python. When I found Panda 3D, I was instantly interested. As I learned to program, I found the manual, and the forum both were extremely beneficial. The community is probably the one feature that made Panda stand out to me. They really helped, and are all very active in the development scene. Panda is a great tool for game design, that just takes a little more effort to learn. I guess it pays off, the learning, in the freedom it allows you.

Thank you ,

Peter Slattery
peterslatteryart.blogspot.com

Abolutely Superb!

I have some friends in professional game industry, and I have seen bunch of game engines, and i have seen how hard is to code with most of them.

I tried a lot of game engines, they were all good and powerful, but they were also a bit hard to use.
Now that i think about how i wrestled with other engines, something came to my mind. Panda3D does not get in your way. I used for quite some time, and i was never in need of doing workaround for anything.

Panda is so easy to use that even an unexperienced kid could get up with it really fast.

More features are being added all the time, and support is really awesome, user community is very friendly and helpful.

Good learning tool, with real life power

I have tried a number of free, as well as having bought game engines in the past. Surprisingly the commercial engine was less complete than the free ones.

Panda3D, however, has been the easiest to learn and implement. Supporting python also makes it easier to work with.

The documentation has a few holes in it, but the forum support is absolutely unparalleled. Questions and answers in the forum frequently feel like a chat discussion with the speed of the reply.

Networking excellent, multi-player support is strong, fast rendering, physics engine, great support of zones-of-interest, the list goes on...

About the only missing thing I have seen is a "level editor", however, there is a blender plug-in that makes exporting objects and scenes from blender into Panda3D's .egg file format very easy to do.

I have abandoned the commercial engine I bought in favor of Panda3D!

Amazing

I have been a coder for years but have always done Rich Internet Applications so when i decided to make a game i looked into a lot of engines and hands down this one was the best i especially liked the python coding part of it because i knew i was going to have to learn a new coding language no matter what but it only took me a week to learn python where as im sure if i was trying to use something else i would still be trying to learn C++ or Java

Amazing engine

In a 3 months of using this engine I realized it's extremely easy to make small and fast games.Now I'm using it to do a real big game and I know it will make wonderful work for me. It's so easy to write game especially with the support of Python

Panda3D nice and easy

well documented, having disney and Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center as developer, used by disney to produce Commercial game (ToonTown and Pirates of the Caribbean Online), great community, use both python(primary) and c++.