-

[Xidram]

@joeldg

here is another wiki that needs some info
indiegames.wikia.com/wiki/Panda3D

I just updated the infobox and filled in a bunch of details on that page, mostly by copying, pasting and tweaking from the Wikipedia page. I really did not feel like writing out the “Features” section, so at the very least I put in a link to the Panda3D site’s Features page.

Oh, and about DevMaster, I’ll rate and review after 1.7.0 comes out.

[leetshit]

You guys defiantly have my vote!
I love panda3d

[tallmystcarpet]

You got my vote too.
Five votes remains to be #3

[ynjh_jo]

@tallmystcarpet

You got my vote too.
Five votes remains to be #3

I couldn’t find your words there.

[tallmystcarpet]

@ynjh_jo

I couldn’t find your words there.

I don’t know why but it didn’t sorted it by date and my user login is not entered! It’s the third one with title: “Panda its is, Panda it will stay.”

[ynjh_jo]

Hey, that’s weird.
It’s been 46 votes for quite a while, and your vote doesn’t add up.
Maybe an anonymous user comment replaces other anonymous one.
I swear I read one, and now it’s only yours.

[tallmystcarpet]

Maybe an anonymous user comment replaces other anonymous one.

No, you need to be registered on the site for adding a comment. Thing that I did yesteray. So, I’m a registered and confirmed user!
Strange that it stays at 46 as it’s strange that my comment is not added at the bottom sorted by date!
I’ll mail them tomorrow morning…

[tallmystcarpet]

Okay, I’ve mailed them. Hope they’ll react!

Dear,
I’m an active member of the Panda3d community and recently become a new member of devmaster. After writing an update about Panda 3d, (title= “Panda its is, Panda it will stay”), we noticed several points that needed to be brought to you attention:

1- The number of votes are apparently no longer increasing when a member of the community is writting a review about Panda3d. This make our favorite engine being badly quoted and, as your website is well known, providing a wrong image to any eventual new user.
2- When a new review is written and posted, it is overwritten the last one entered which may explain point 1.
3- Morever, the review is not sorted by date. Any eventual reader will directly start with the latest and newest feedback posted. As Panda is frequently being upgraded, this point may also provide an outdated information to your readers.
4- (less important) the user name of the review’s writter is not added to the post.

Can you please have a look and eventualy correct these errors in order to provide a good overall information to all your devmasters visitors ?
Should you need any further clarification in the point stated upper, d’ont hesitate to contact me on my personal Email address.

In advance thanks for this websites and your good support.

In the meantime, if someone can be kind and write a new rate review for Panda confirming our fears.
huh… I can’t believe there is a chance of getting a better rate than Ogre!

[tallmystcarpet]

Well, now it’s clear: ynjh_jo was right!
Someone did post a new rate today which ovewritten mine and took the 3rd position from top) Also, the user of that person didn’t show up as mine.
Worst, the rate stayed at 46!!!

Off course, I did not receive any answer from the mail sent…
Personnally, I discovered Panda grace to devmaster and if I would be searching for a 3d engine, knowing nothing about all the engine there is out there and read the last review (well, which is not reallly the last one as not sorted), I’ll go directly to unity3d website…

Well, even if this is not a war between the 3d engines, it remains not fair for our beloved Panda and I’m affraid there is nothing to do about it!

[ynjh_jo]

@tallmystcarpet

Well, now it’s clear: ynjh_jo was right!
Someone did post a new rate today which ovewritten mine and took the 3rd position from top) Also, the user of that person didn’t show up as mine.
Worst, the rate stayed at 46!!!

I’m affraid there is nothing to do about it!

All we can do until it’s sorted out is keeping those poor persons’ (including you) comments here, before it’s overwritten. And once it’s fixed, we can post them all, without losing many votes.

@May 3

Nice game engine
Panda3D is an easy to use game engine. It’s written mostly in C++ for speed with the whole API available to, and supposed to be used from, python. I’ve used it for hobby projects while learning to create 3D games using a game engine. Panda3D has also been used by Disney for commercial games.

[ynjh_jo]

It seems fixed already. 2 new comments.

[ynjh_jo]

on the podium already.

[ynjh_jo]

It happened again, that 3rd review I quoted is replaced by this one :

@Mar 9

Good engine, but it can be deceiving
When I first heard about this engine, I was really happy to have a free / open source engine that would help me make games rather easily for two reasons.

*It has all general features in one package: it had audio, physics, networking, shader support, packaging, publishing, etc. So all you need to do as a programmer is focus on game code.

*The use of python: I love this language because it makes programming a lot easier and more intuitive since you can have a code that is more “readable in English”. with few lines of code you can do many things and the API is good for you to use and learn new things.

So far it was fantastic using simple tests I made to see the capabilities of the engine in all tree platforms. However, when the time came to actually make a full game things started to get ugly.

When I started developing the pre-alpha version things started to get out of hand. The tutorials from the documentation are too poor to show what you can really do with the engine, compared to PyOgre that is more complete. The Api documentation is not enough to clear your doubts and you have to resort to the forums or IRC channel more often than you can imagine. And even though some of the example code provided in the forums that could help you may not work in your specific case.

As for the features, I founds the physics to be the trickiest of them all, things may fall through objects when they fall from low altitude and work well when it’s from high altitude. Panda colliders are good but when you use real physics you have to twists many things and do trial and error over something that should be more simple. while you can use ODE wrapper for Panda, I had issues with that as well and there are no good examples on how to use it.

The other option for me was switch to c++ so I could use better options and use a c++ physics engine like Bullet or Newton, but the setup is not very intuitive and you cannot debug your application.

In the end I was very frustrated with the engine. I went back to Irrlicht and created a framework with Bullet physics and SFML. And I can create a scene with lighting and all editor with CopperCube. while Panda has a level editor that is still under development

However I wouldn’t rule panda3D completely. It’s a good game engine and you can make many simple games with it. But when you go full to a project better be prepared and patient

and stuck with 51 votes.

[ynjh_jo]

and again…

@Mar 13

My engine of choice.
I’ve explored Irrlicht, Ogre, Cube, Torque, and more over the past few years. Panda3d has been the best solution for me by far. To explain my rating in greater detail.

This is a complete game and simulation engine with a very rich feature set, not just a 3d renderer. Its still a good render with very easy to use advanced shaders and rendering effects, but there are still more features than you can shake a stick at. It may not have been so in the past but this engine has been maturing for a long time now.

The ease of use is just unparalleled in my experience. Greater even than Torque which had great scripting abilities, a built in console, a built in editor, and a very easy to manipulate scene graph. Torque’s failing however was in the assumptions it made about gameplay, and the way all of its features were entangled in the c++ code, making it a real headache to improve on or replace any aspect. Panda3d makes no assumptions about your game that would put any obstructions in your path, while at the same time letting you rapidly and easily tap into its feature set. Also python really can’t be beat for scripting, and Panda3d applications can be written entirely in python without appearing to hide the other half of the logic in the engine.

The stability is flawless in my experience. Even your own fatal mistakes will trigger very explicit exceptions. The performance is good and comparable to other engines. It has great optimization tools included. The engine makes good use of threading, but I found it a bit tricky to push tasks I wrote in python into other threads and track performance across multiple threads.

The documentation is fantastic, and if you have any doubts just look at the manual alone panda3d.org/manual/index.php/Main_Page. Make no mistake however, this is a python game engine with c++ speed behind. The c++ API is pretty clear, straight forward, and well documented, but it doesn’t compare to the python interface. The c++ side is simple to add new features to, but I think Panda3d really excels if you plan to do most of your development in python. If you’re a c++ addict Panda3d is a worthy contender, but may or may no be your first choice.

Oh and its free even for commercial games thanks to its very generous BSD license.

[Dengue]

Added a very small review and rated taking into account the info and little experience I have on Panda.