When comparing Leadwerks 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 Leadwerks is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Panda3D is:
The liberal license allows use of the engine for any purpose without restrictions or royalties.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very good entity system, did have GUI functions, easy to use terrain editor with vegetation system.
Good API tutoials, workshop elements which can be loaded from steam.
Pro Both Windows and Linux supported
Pro Built-in level editor
Has an acceptable 3D map editor that is easy to use.
Pro Versatile flow diagram script model
Leadwerks's flowgraphs resemble flowcharts where each box represents a function or value, with connections between them representing program flow. This provides a better at-a-glance indication of game logic than a simple list of events, and makes complex behaviors easier to accomplish.
Pro Community forum offers plenty of support
It makes game developing much easier if you have someone backing you up when you run into a bug or other issues, and get replies within hours .
Pro Decently sized library of tutorials for both Lua and C++
Pro Very clean and easy C++ API
Pro Lua scripting support
Pro Reasonably priced
Standard edition of Leadwerks costs 92,99€. Additionally, it often goes on sale on Steam.
Pro C++ scripting support
Pro Terrain editor
The terrain editor allows sculpting, paint, vegetation placement and importing of external maps. Especially the painting is done very well and can lead quickly to very professional looking results.
Pro Easy to use API and scripting language
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 Little to no support
This product relies on community support, although some members are helpful and quite approachable they don't like to share their secrets with people that are new to programming.
The product is sold as a Full featured platform but it seems to more in the Alpha stage of development as a lot of the good aspects where taken out in previous versions.
Con Has a track record of broken promises
Con Forums are poorly run and censored
Con Highly misleading advertising
Con Only prefabs made with the Leadwerks IDE could be used.
The two main problems for me is that C++ is not as easy to use like LUA. The IDE should also support C++. The secons is that only prefabs can be used which are made with the IDE. So you can not easy made a game that can be modded by the user.
Con Weak out-of-the-box AI
The only AI movement function is going in a straight line.
Con Very buggy
Leadworks is a not complete, it's a work in progress. As such many parts of the engine are clunky, especially the level editor.
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.