Hi!
I had a Penthium III 1GHz 512MB and Riva TNT2. With this configuration, the “Panda Greeting Card” example takes 35 seconds to show Carnegie’s logo when executed for the first time. For second time it reduces to 20 seconds. I’m wondering if this wasn’t too much?
What do you guys think about it? Any tips for better performance?
Thanks!
It is true that Panda applications are not particularly speedy to start up in general, although we are working on a system that improves this load time markedly, which may be in place by the time we release Panda3D version 1.1.
Although it looks like the greeting card application has an intentional delay of an additional 5 seconds after the window is successfully opened. I’m not sure what the purpose of this delay is–maybe just to build up anticipation? 
David
I found when I was coding the greeting card that the init function would finish and the card would start before the engine was truly ready, and as a result it would start into the card. The 5 second wait is to try to avoid any hiccups so that the card starts from the start. If you have any better ways around that I’m all ears.
It’s the same reason that the ball will occasionally go off the table in the labryinth tutorial. I do plan to take your advice and change it to fluidPos for that example.
I’ll wait for the next version of Panda, anxiously. 
Try putting the command:
globalClock.setFrameTime(globalClock.getRealTime())just before you create the World object. That will reset the gap between frame time and real time, which is what the clock is resetting when you issue the run() command.
David
Tried it. It still starts pretty reliably a few seconds into the animation without at least a Wait(3)