Ok, finally I decided to start a project in panda3d. It looks for me perfect for starting with 3d game development as it is very good commented and the graphicspipeline seems stable for me. I had no problems exporting my animated 3d model with panda3d’s egg-exporter for blender. Loading an actor (a animated model in panda3d) are 2 lines and calling an animation another line like actor.loop(”walk”).

With all that I had problems in jMonkeyEngine. Neither MD5 nor ogre was able to load my model. Ok,…I’m quite sure that the limiting factor was my model. Nevertheless I give panda3d and especially python a chance.

At the moment I’m not so really sure how to go on. I really like jME and java and find it so cool that there is such a great Engine and want to participate in developing the engine. But at the moment my problem is to get my objects loaded into jME properly. As soon as it getting a bit more complex there are problems. Using MD5Importer or OgreMeshImporter. I’m quite sure that all could be more or less achieved the right way nowadays but I need something like a guideline how to treat your object that it is fully exported by the exporters and also being loaded by the importers.

Yesterday I just tried to use PANDA3D to load a model that was not possible to load with Ogre (MD5 does) and it worked from the beginning using the egg-exporter. With panda I have had some texture problems but that may be an experience problem. As it is a new programming language (python) and a new system.

Panda3d is so overwhelming in the point of documentation! It’s unbelivable. I think this should be an example how jMonkeyEngine should look like in a couple of years. I even found some sample blender-files that are able to export with their blender-exporter. So you could have a look how that models are build up… I’m really curious about testing them….

Well,…at the moment I think about starting a nice little minimalistic game-project and I am still not sure what technology to use. jME or Panda3d. At the moment I think I will give PANDA3D the chance to show was it is made of. jME I will try to find out the best way how to model a character and animate it so it can be imported everytime…. So I will go on fighting with jME,PANDA3D and BLENDER……