PANDA3D

Hi All,

Well I decided on Pand3d, I was able to write several small programs in Panda in about 4 hours.

I spent all friday and Sat trying to build just a simple room in Crystal, Irrlicht and Raydium. Although each game engine has strengths and weaknesses, Panda was the simplest in getting your development environment setup. Within 5 minutes I was coding and making some impressive programs. Since Python has literally countless add-on modules for both Linux, MAC and Windows it gives me alot of room to grow. Since it is free, anyone can download and help out. It has solid networking built in for MMORPGS. I can build great UIs within and outside the game. This is important as I obviously will need to build a server to manage client connections and build a toolset to create the game. Since I can compile on both my LAVA Linux desktop and XP work desktop, it means I can program wherever I am at. Also Panda has built is support for alot of the files I want to integrate, 3dsmax, X, mp3, AVIs.

Since Panda is built on python and is free, I can distribute the final client as a self-contained binary using tools such as py2exe or pyinstaller. This is important as I don't want fellow gamers to have to manually setup a python install just to play my game. With py2exe and pyinstaller I can literally make my game install a standard EXE on windows and a standard binary install on Linux. Simple double click to play.