I’ve started learning Panda3D, the game engine behind Disney’s Toontown and Pirates of the Caribbean Online.
I made a picture to commemorate this occasion:
I’ve been following Panda3D for a while, but never really gave it that much attention. I became more interested after reading the Toon Town post-mortem onm Gamasutra, epecially since they attributed a lot of their success to switching their scripting languages to Python.
My initial thoughts are that it’s a fairly intuitive game engine for Python programmers. There’s no real toolset to speak of, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It looks like the intended workflow is based on utilising existing tools (eg. 3D Studio, Photoshop) and small exporters or converter scripts. Which makes sense; no point trying to make artists learn new tools.
I’ll post more thoughts as I get more experience with it.