When comparing Tombstone Engine vs Panda3D, the Slant community recommends Panda3D for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Panda3D is ranked 4th while Tombstone Engine is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose Panda3D is:
The liberal license allows use of the engine for any purpose without restrictions or royalties.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Complete access to high quality C++ source code
Tombstone gives full access to the clean and professional C++ source code allowing editing and upgrading anything in the system.
Pro Reliable, fast and well optimized
Pro No royalties
Pro Lots of learning resources
Including extensive documentation both in code as well as online along with a wiki, tutorials and a demo game.
Pro Extending engine's functionality is straightforward
Due to the well-organized, highly modular design of the engine adding custom functionality is easy.
Pro Full-featured and modern
Comes integrated with support for physics, audio, networking, input devices, resource management as well as modern features such as real-time shadows, horizontal mapping, voxel-based terrain, dynamic lighting, post-processing effects and much, much more.
Pro Lifetime engine updates
Pro Supportive community
Tombstone has a small, tight-knit community that's well educated and professional. Eric Lengyel, the main developer, can often be found giving thorough advice to users on the forums.
Pro Proven to be a capable engine
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 Only available to big studios
Con Small community
Con Lacks D3D support
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.