Anyone new to the Panda3D engine is told in the first few pages of the manual that the engine’s main developers are CMU and Disney, they see “Carnegie Mellon” on the top-right of the website, “© Carnegie Mellon University” on the bottom-left, in the contact page the email and postal mail are CMU’s.
I’ve been using the engine since 2009 and I don’t see CMU developing anything since then to be honest. I’ve seen students contribute few features two times and the last time that was few years ago. And even the tools they make are not maintained after their semester and unfinished projects (like their scene editor) are abandoned.
I’ve also not seen teachers from CMU develop anything for the engine since my arrival in 2009.
In short, I wouldn’t call CMU an “active developer”, actually I wouldn’t call CMU a developer at all after the few years of silence.
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against CMU and they have probably contributed a lot to the engine, but that was many-many moons ago.
Right now the only thing they seem to do is allow the Panda3d website to be hosted on their servers.
Now let’s talk about Disney. By my impression David Rose has done tremendous work on the engine and from what I know he has written most of the code for Panda3D when it was first created by Disney. But he seems to be still developing the engine for himself rather than being paid by Disney to do so. I’ve seen few other people from Disney make few contributions (few years ago), but that’s still not enough to call Disney a “main developer” too.
Let’s get back to my first point: new developers are told in the docs and the site as a whole that the active developers are CMU and Disney.
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This is very bad as they later realize that CMU and Disney haven’t really done much for years, which gives the impression that this is an abandonware, which makes them less likely to choose the engine/contribute.
That was my impression too at one point. -
I also imagine if more people will know that the engine is currently being developed by an internet community they will be more willing to contribute themselves then if they knew it’s mainly done by a company or a university which might (according to some of them) be less needing/wanting help from freelancers.
What I suggest to do is update the texts on this site to clearly explain that “Panda3D has been created and is still being used by Disney VR, has been actively developed at some point by CMU ETC and is currently developed by contributors around the world”.
This is exactly the case with other engines like Irrlicht or OGRE, who’s main developers have “passed on” and they are currently being developed by an online community.
Many will probably find this idea crazy, but I’d go as far to suggest to move the site to another hosting service like Sourceforge (that’s where the Irrlicht engine’s website has been all along) to prevent every confusion that CMU still has an active role in the development.
Another not-so-crazy suggestion will be to add a page named “Developers” or “Team” on the “information” section of the website which will have the names of the current active developers (and maybe their images… and bio), like the one the OGRE engine website has: ogre3d.org/about/team
If there was a page like that when I was was starting with Panda3D I would be… “more secure” about sticking with this particular library.
Again, I don’t have anything against CMU or Disney and without them Panda3D wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t be as mature, but giving them “false” credit today seems to do more harm than good.
And sorry for the really long post.