Materials aren't being applied when exporting to .egg

When you use Cycles to create a material, you’re creating a material that only Cycles can render. Cycles is a raytraced renderer, which is fundamentally different from a rasterizing renderer like real-time graphics APIs use. The screenshot you showed shows the ball realistically reflect light cast by the atmosphere, and it also shows ambient occlusion in gaps where light cannot get into easily.

We cannot export files that use material nodes. It’s only possible to set basic material settings (such as a subset of those provided in Blender Game mode) and then in Panda3D apply shaders that apply things like ambient occlusion and image-based lighting to produce an image similar to the raytraced image you are seeing in Cycles.

You might be interested in the RenderPipeline project, which implements real-time techniques like image-based lighting and global illumination. There’s a Blender exporter in the works that comes with a custom renderer mode which would allow you to set material settings and preview how the material will look when loaded into the render pipeline.

Also see the relevant forum thread.