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Add to SafariWhen comparing Panda3D vs Flax Engine, the Slant community recommends Panda3D for most people. In the question“What are the best game engines for point & click adventure games?” Panda3D is ranked 14th while Flax Engine is ranked 54th. 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 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.
Pro Free
Can be used for free until you hit a rather high revenue cap, at which point you have to pay royalties.
Pro Powerful C# scripting
C# scripting is really well made, comparable to Unity, but without any of the legacy cruft.
Pro Multiplatform
Supports most platforms, including Windows, Linux, Android, Nintendo Switch, ...
Pro C++ support
The entire core is written in C++ and it supports writing game code in C++. The interoperability between C# and C++ is also nothing to scoff at.
Pro Modern rendering backend
Has a very modern, performant and beautiful rendering backend.
Pro Supports multiple IDEs
Works with any text editor and comes with proper support for Visual Studio, VSCode and Jetbrains Rider.
Pro Excellent documentation
The documentation is well written, up to date and accepts improvements from the community.
Pro Great and extensible editor
The editor is both powerful and simple. My favourite part is how easy it is to extend the editor with custom magic.
Pro Source code available
The entire source of the engine is available on Github, though not under an open source license.
Cons
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.
Con New software
As is standard with new software, not all of the bugs have been ironed out yet.
Con Few plugins
Unlike more mature engines, there isn't a vibrant ecosystem of plugins yet.
Con Not open source
While the source code is available, it's not quite open source
Con Not latest C# version
It uses Mono and is still on some variant of C# 7.
Con No OpenGL support
It only supports modern APIs, namely Vulkan and DirectX. This means that it won't run on very old machines.
