When comparing Panda3D vs GameGuru, the Slant community recommends Panda3D for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Panda3D is ranked 4th while GameGuru is ranked 38th. 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 Designed for ease of use
Simplicity and accessibility are the core design goals of FPS Creator Reloaded.
Pro Active and helpful community
Users share ideas, help, and advice through the official forums. The community also provides a wealth of free assets, and the GameGuru Assets Store sees constant additions.
Pro Continuous development and updates
News and improvements are released on a monthly schedule. Interaction between The Game Creators and project backers is excellent.
Pro Awesome tech support
Pro Easy to use your own custom assets
Easily import your own 3D models with the built-in importer and create custom characters with the Character creator. Custom weapons are much more difficult, though.
Pro Massive community of users
The gamer creator forums have a large number of users, developing games, making models for sale and to give away for other users. They answer questions, help each other with problems in their games, and can make using this software so much more fun and easy.
Pro Royalty free
Games you publish with GameGuru can be sold without any restrictions or commissions.
Pro Easy to use editor
An easy 3D editor to create your own maps in seconds with drag-and-drop function.
Pro Friendly GUI
Awesome friendly GUI, and quite easy to use.
Pro Building editor
Currently in development but already looking very good! Easily create big and customized buildings with default building blocks and share them with others.
Also very easy to use in the designer: The buildings are treated like entities but still directly available in the 'building editor mode'.
Pro Powerful scripting language
Uses Lua.
Pro Large asset store
A store where you can buy various assets for your games like sounds, 3D models, weapons... Very good prices and a lot of assets are even free.
Pro Feature priorities are chosen by the community
The Game Creators team frequent the forums and ask the community for feeback and suggestions both there and via an open poll on the website. They have a great history of reading suggestions, viewing screenshots, and generally working with the community.
Pro Optimised engine for editor
The game engine is optimized for efficient use of memory.
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 Slow
Everything takes ages..feels like Unreal 4
Con Lack of user-interface
Although you can customize a lot, the user-interface does not show that. But plans are in place to improve this with some front facing GUI into the LUA scripts so you don't need to code as much.