Hey i have been looking at the engine quite a bit and have decided i would really love to using it to create a simple prototype and possibly a full game that i wanted to do.
I had a few questions i was hoping a few people could help me out with though.
what format are the maps/environments in? .egg like the model files or another one altogether?
and the program i use to create maps are in .map,obj,x format.
is there a tool somewhere available that i can use to convert to the proper format?
sorry if these questions have been asked before and thanks alot ahead of time.
panda dosent differ between map files or anthing else, it uses whatever it can read 
panda can read many formats, and also provides many formats which can be converted to egg. https://www.panda3d.org/manual/index.php/Main_Page see VIII -> E
EGG is pandas native format but you can read x,lwo,dxf,flt and others just like egg. only a bit slower.
if your mapeditor can export X you should try it. and see if it works as it should. if not there are many ways to convert obj to egg. search the forum for it if you wanna know more about it.
panda can either load the xfiles with
map = loader.loadModel(“yourmap.x”)
or you use the x2egg tool which comes with panda.
during development you are best off with using .egg files. once you finished the game you can convert them to .bam files. which are smaller and faster to load. (they only work for a specific panda version. so always keep the egg backups somewhere.)