Animations are handled in Python?!

General Discussion
1

Reading as much of the manual as I can so I can get a quick start with understanding the engine.

Please correct me if I’m wrong but, the manual says the Actor is a python class inherited from the C++ implementation for NodePath.

I even loaded up Actor.py to verify this.

Animation is one of the big cpu intensive processes next to rendering and whatnot, and I’ve noticed that a lot of panda3D games have somewhat unsmooth animations (for example the example panda model and its panda-walk4 animation as well as, no offense disney, the various animations for Toon Town and Pirates of the Caribean Online). Is this because animation is handled python side?

Edit:
Never mind about the ‘unsmooth animations’ part, I realized there is support for frame interpolation, still I’d like to know why Actor was made in python.

2

No. The lowlevel animation structures in Panda are all written in C++.
Actor is just a highlevel wrapper around them so you can easily use them. It adds no performance overhead, as everything that does the hard work is fully integrated into Panda’s C++ core.

3

Thanks for the reply, I found this out after looking through some of the source code, I suppose I should give things more investigations before making assumptions. Panda seems like a really well put together engine.