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Add to SafariWhen comparing Engine 001 Game Maker vs Panda3D, the Slant community recommends Panda3D for most people. In the question“What are the best 100% free and easy game engines for beginners?” Panda3D is ranked 6th while Engine 001 Game Maker is ranked 34th. The most important reason people chose Panda3D is:
The liberal license allows use of the engine for any purpose without restrictions or royalties.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Light weight
An amazing minimal download size at around 100mb.
Pro Easy to use
Engine 001 allows you to get to making games quicker since you aren't putting allot of time into figuring out complicated interfaces.
Pro Visual scripting
By using pre-build behaviors\actions and more you can 'program' your game by simply 'linking' they in the editor.
Pro Free, open-source, and permissive license
The liberal license allows use of the engine for any purpose without restrictions or royalties.
Pro Will be very easy for developers already familiar with Python
Although it's possible to use only C++ to program in Panda3D, all its power is available to the Python scripting language, while not trading in performance since the performance-critical parts are implemented in C++.
It has a powerful binding layer that exposes the vast majority of the API via Python-based interfaces.
Pro Supports most popular physics engines
Panda3D has in-depth integration with industry standard physics engines such as Bullet, NVIDIA PhysX and ODE, but also offers a simpler built-in physics engines that will cover more basic needs.
Pro Flexible scene and object hierarchy system
Creating weird world constructs is generally a breeze. The node system the engine runs with allows to build self-looping worlds and, on large scale, non-Euclidean scenes without having to introduce a huge amount of custom code.
Pro Powerful profiling and debugging tools
Panda3D has a suite of powerful tools to help track down performance bottlenecks, memory leaks and examine internal state.
Pro Supports browser deployment
Panda3D offers web plug-ins that allow deployment of an application to all major browsers. A WebGL port is in the works as well.
Cons
Con New tricks for getting more money
As it doesn't have enough tutorials, and they don't wanna make more, so they just add some new services about one on one help which that cost 40$ for an hour.
Con Windows only
The editor is Windows only, no OSX or Linux versions are planned.
Con 3D features may not be enough for some users
The 3D capabilities of the engine are a bit limited (for today standards), and some of the times you'll need to work around to create something.
Con Not for beginners
Even those few tutorials don't teach you the very basics, and first you must learn the basics somewhere else (the submitted pros are by professional guys).
Con No successful/ good games
Just ask them about games made with this engine and you will see that even if you find some good games, those are mostly simple/small ones.
Con Poor performance
If you want to use more than a few actors/light/events, or you're trying to get a pretty look, you will get a significant drop in frame rates. This is especially true if you want to implement a moving light (something like a flashlight).
Con They don't fix the bugs for you quickly
If you encounter a bug or problem and report that as bug report, it will take about 1 week to get any answer, and if they solve that, the fixed version will just come up with next update for engine which that isn't be soon and no specific time, so maybe you have to wait for one month.
Con Some workflows can be confusing
Sometimes you have to do a time-consuming workaround to just do a simple function.
Con HTML5 export is poor
There are significant drops in frame rate; some bugs that can even ruin your game (also, looks like just run on firefox).
Con No IAP or Ads support
Are you a mobile developer? If so it's good to know that it has export for ios/Android but no support for IAP or Ads.
Con No unified editing program
Unlike Unity and Unreal, Panda3D doesn't currently offer a single, unified editing program in which objects can simply be dragged in and assigned properties (although third-party solutions are available). Developers are expected to design their scenes in a modelling program like Maya or Blender instead, and import them into Panda3D using Python code.
Con Limited tutorial
Step by step tutorial is limited. Manual is too general and short without examples. Samples are too complex for beginners.
Con Direct3D support is behind
Direct3D support not up to par with OpenGL support, only version 9 is supported.
Con Terrible compilers support
Does not support any other compilers then MSVC on Windows, neither Clang nor MinGW.
Con Developer isn't very competent
Panda3D only has one developer and he utterly fails to fix problems with his engine, instead focuses on style guidelines and breaking code.
Con Loading Pandas3d will change your builtins to contain non explicit references to non-standard helper functions
A lot of the pollution comes from storing global state. Instead, you can store and update the global state of a namespace instead. As for the built-in pollution, you can make a wrapper that backs up builtins, imports pandas and then restores builtins, though this may not work as pandas almost certainly uses it's extra builtins to work. The best thing to do would be to explicitly import the same objects that are in the builtins over the top of the modified builtin namespace, although it doesn't remove the code smell, it helps to make things look less (if not at all) magic.
