Are interior buildings handled the same as standard model objects? I know in game engines like Torque they have a separate classes for interiors and construction is slightly different. How does that work here?
Does the system have vehicle code setup as a default or would this be something that we need to create on our own?
Lastly for animations I know they can be stored as an egg file. Can they be added on the fly? The reason I ask that is because Torque requires they be defined in the datablock and to add new egg files the whole datablock has to be redefined.
Panda3d only has 2 different types of objects, Models and Actors (someone correct me if im wrong). Everything else has to be programmed.
There are some examples, but afaik none for vehicles. Depending on the detail grade (do the wheels have to be on the ground to accelerate), this can be very complex. Just moving around as for a character without collision detection is about 10 lines of code.
I my eyes panda3d has big advantages over Torque. At least if you dont want to code c/c++. If you have something torque is not prepared to do for you (like walking on a sphere), you have to code it in c. In panda you can do everything in python. On the other side, panda has no scene editor (make your own one, or place your objects in the code), everything has to be done in code (even moving a character or collision detection).
So if you are a artist, take torque but be restricted to standart stuff/actions.
If you are a python programmer, take panda3d and programm everything. Takes you longer but gives you complete freedom.
If you are a c programmer, it doesnt matter.
I havent worked with animated models very often but panda3d seems to be very capable (and you can store animations in separate files), or even use the animations for different models (if the bone-structures are the same).