Godot is easier out of the box. I do feel that in the long run it’s a trap.
Pretty much everything in Godot is called a scene, I dont know why. You can put scenes in scenes. You quickly end up with a lot of them. In Panda3d it’s easier to generate things on the fly. In Godot it’s more of a ‘well, I guess I need a healthbar lets add another new scene and a new script’.
I much prefer creating a composite with code over having several different Godot scenes. It’s easy to lose track of what’s where and the structure of the game starts to suffer. I’m sure with experience and good practises you can alleviate a lot of that but still, I much prefer moving code around in my editor over futzing with things in an interface.
The quick visual feedback in Godot is nice, but then also falls flat quickly because the inspector on the right is way overcrowded. So it quickly becomes ‘lets sail the seven menus, again’. Making changes in a code only approach is easier and faster. It is nice to see what it’s gonna look like without having to run the scene or the game but the time lost fiddling with menus turns it into a net negative.
In Godot you create a signal and then assign it listeners. Later, someone can emit that signal. The problem here is that none of these are global (unless you create a global script (in project settings) to store the signal in.) The signal is specific to the instance. If you dont make it global, you quickly get into quadratic situations with n signals needing to be told about m listeners each, everyone needing to know about eachother, it’s a mess.
There is no innate Finite State Machine.
There are assets and addons easily added to the project but you have to pay attention that the addons stay in their own folder. There was one addon I really liked and that’s GUT, it adds unit testing support for Godot, it’s quite good. It supports things like checking for orphans that didnt get cleaned up and memory leakage checks.
I’m gonna wrap it up here, in summary, it’s easier to get started, very easy to make a build too, but I feel it’s gonna lead you down a path of of ineffective project layouts and messy mudball code/scenes.
I personally prefer panda3d, for it’s code only approach. If I need a visual tool, I can (attempt to) build it myself.