I should mention - this wish list is cool, but the fact is, nothing’s going to get done unless somebody volunteers.
The Disney team is always working hard on a game that uses panda. In the process of working on that game, they’re constantly improving panda. But the realities of commercial software development being what they are, they can’t spend a lot of time on any panda features that don’t contribute directly to the game they’re working on.
As for the Carnegie-Mellon team, that’s me. And I’m a professor with a full-time teaching load. I put in time on Panda as well, but most of it gets used up dealing with OS and driver compatibility issues. Not much time left for adding features. However, I do think I have time to finish my new improved movie-player/free audio manager for panda.
This fall, I’ll have some students who will be able to put in a little time on panda too. They’ll probably be able to improve the manual a little, and work on the stylistic aspects of the website.
Beyond that, it needs to come from the community. Fortunately, the community has recently become much more active. I see an awful lot of useful panda features being developed out there - the shadow codes, the text console, the OpenAL audio managers, etc. Now that there are so many, we need to set up some way for me to integrate these into panda.
My suggestion is that if you would like to see one of these integrated into the panda codebase, then here’s what you have to do: get it polished up to the point where you feel it’s ready for inclusion, then send me an email. (etc-panda3d@lists.andrew.cmu.edu). If it’s clean and ready-to-go, I’ll be able to integrate it very quickly.