When comparing Panda3D vs O3DE (previously Lumberyard), the Slant community recommends Panda3D for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Panda3D is ranked 4th while O3DE (previously Lumberyard) is ranked 14th. 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 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 No royalty charges and completely free
Pro Amazon has announced 3 in house games using it developed from Amazon Game Studios
As a proof of how much Amazon is committed to the project.
Pro Advanced VR support and VR Samples to bootstrap your project
Advenced stereoscopic reprojection to save rendering time.
Pro Landscape editor
Sculpting and painting tools for terrain and instanced details.
Procedural generation of terrain.
Pro Roads and Rivers tool
Built-in support for roads and rivers to ease the design of rich game environments.
Pro Free development license, including source code
Full source code for Engine Editor and every tool.
Pro Easy to create full realistic natural environments
Thanks to built-in terrain, time of day, ocean and volumetric fog systems. There is also a gfx pack with various environmental meshes, cloud, particles, materials and skyboxes.
Pro Very lightweight and scalable entity component system
Multiple entity contexts, reflection, serialization, replication, script binding, event bus (EBus) messaging, fully cascading prefabs (slices).
Every reflected property can be fully exposed in the editor with a customizable gui control and can be animated in the built in animation tools.
Pro Cloud gems
Online oriented plugins composed by both client, server and administration components to easily add various online capabilities without further work (es leaderboards, login, message of the day, downloadable contents).
Since version 1.7 they has been released at a steady rate.
Pro In-editor 3D modeling tool for fast level prototyping
Very advanced 3D prototyping tool with many modeling features and UV mapping support available. If you want you can build any kind of fully textured static mesh without relying on external tools.
Pro Total Illumination v2 Realtime GIobal Illumination
Realistic looking lighting bounces.
It doesn't require long offline precomputation times like other static and dynamic GI solutions based on lightmaps or other similar techniques.
Pro Uses AWS cloud
Other than common aws functionality it supports game specific Game Lift for autoscaling game servers.
Pro Slices a very powerful nested prefab system with hierarchical property inheritance
Modular workflow and flexible cascaded propagation of changes.
Pro Modular system
To easy add and remove modular functionalities to a project and easy share them.
Modules are called Gems and can contain code and/or assets.
Pro Very Flexible Base Shader with many built in techniques
Tessellation and Displacement.
Various Parallax Mapping techniques(POM siluette).
Translucency and Sub surface scattering.
Detail Mapping.
Material Blending.
Emission.
Advanced uv transformation and animation.
Pro Rendering of volumetric fx with full light and shadows support
Global environmental volumetric fog and/or hand placed custom shaped volumes with featuring full lighting and shadows.
Pro High quality free assets packs
Amazon made available a selection of triple A quality scenes filled with high quality assets.
Pro Specular reflection antialiasing
Implements the most recent technique available (published in 2017) from Anton Kaplanyan.
Pro Flexible uber shaders with cache and hot reloading
You can modify shaders while testing the game.
Shader files are modular and annotated to setup the material editing gui and filter out mutually exclusive options. All shader permutation are compiled almost instantly from the asset processor and cached for later use.
Pro Built-in Twitch support even by visual scripting
You can create games that react to keywords entered in a designated Twitch channel and let streamers to invite targeted viewers into their game sessions on demand with ease.
Pro WWise LTX Audio
It is still possible to use the non LTX version with few changes.
Pro Lua scripting with the built-in IDE
Built-in Lua editor with remote debugger to debug Lua scripts running in any device.
Pro Virtual file system with live reload on any device
Optimized versions of assets can be streamed live to any device connected over the network.
This makes possible to implement asset types that hot reloads reducing drastically the time to test new content and little changes on device.
Pro Every aspect of the engine is made with scalability in mind
Multiple grain of control over any kind of engine setting and various kind of Lod systems. Settings can be grouped and applied in batch.
Pro Is the first engine to feature SpeedTree 8
Pro Perforce versioning system pre-integrated with the tools
Perforce also comes with a free version for a limited number of team members.
Pro Cutting edge character shaders
Has skin shaders with subsurface scattering and weighted wrinkle maps, eye shaders with refraction parallax, hair with anysotropic specular reflections, etc.
Pro Order independent transparencies
A must for problematic things like hair , vegetation and scenes with complex solid transparent objects(es glass of water with ice cubes).
Pro Implements the state of the art for Temporal Antialiasing from NVIDIA Research
Special iteration of Temporal AA to battle the ghosting issue omnipresent in engines using other Temporal AA techniques.
Pro New Fbx Importer adds support for every software exporting in fbx
It now works for both static models and animations and support advanced setups(es lods and physics).
Pro Full HDR renderer path with output support for HDR tv standards
Updated renderer pipeline to leverage the full spectrum of precision, luminosity and image processing features of the latest HDR tv.
Pro Cinematic multitrack tool with full featured animation editing
Animation Spline editor supporting huge range of keyframing and tangent editing tools.
Pro Advanced in-game UI with 2D and 3D placing
The UI uses the entity component system so it's fully modular and easily expandable. The UI is easily skinnable and supports border scaling images (scale 9). Powerful layouting system supporting multiple screen resolutions. Being based on the entity system every property can be fully animated.
It is elegantly managed in a separate entity context so it doesn't get messed up with other kind of entities and their components like in other engines, but it's fully decoupled communicating with entities in other context on specific event buses.
Pro Full source code repository with updated development branch now on GitHub
See here.
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 Some Legacy systems are still incompatible or not fit well with the new entity component system
At first it is common to try a feature and then understand that it is meant to work with the legacy system and not with the newest one.
Legacy systems get replaced or updated to work well with the new entity component system in every new version, but there is still some work to do.
One example for all Flow Graph visual scripting is meant for the legacy entity and Script Canvas is the visual scripting conterpart for the new entity system, but it is still not available at the moment.
Con No source code repository with updated development branch (requests for Github support currently pending)
You need to wait up to 30 or 60 days for fixes as they are shipped with the next official release.
There is no comfortable way to submit fixes and changes to the engine as the forum is the only tool for sharing code.