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Quote:

Originally Posted by sammyh (Post 105274)

Do you know what game enigine disney used to create POTCO?
Panda3D. Pfft. Didnt even write their own game enigine lol. heres the link to panda3D that shows the screenshots: http://panda3d.org/screens.php?page=1

told ya. :)

Actually, Disney did create Panda3d.

The Disney VR studio is a branch of Disney that was created to build 3D attractions for Disney theme parks. They built an attraction called "Aladdin's Magic Carpet," and the engine they created for that was eventually to become Panda3D. The engine in its current form bears little resemblance to those early years. Over time, Panda3D was used for additional VR rides at Disney theme parks, and was eventually used in the creation of Toontown, an online game set in a cartoon world. [4]

In 2002, the engine was released as open source. According to the authors, this was so that they "could more easily work with universities on Virtual Reality research projects." [5] However, it took some time for Panda3D to take off as an open-source project. From the article:

The system, although quite usable by the team that developed it, was not quite "open source ready." There were several interested users, but building and installing the system was incredibly complex, and there was little in the way of documentation or sample code, so there was no significant open source community right away.

However, the open-sourcing of the engine allowed Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center to join in the development of the engine. While Disney engineers continued to do the bulk of the development, the Carnegie-Mellon team built a role for itself polishing the engine for public consumption, writing documentation, and adding certain high-end features such as shaders.

Panda3D's name was once an acronym: "Platform Agnostic Networked Display Architecture."[6] However, since that phrase has largely lost its meaning, the word "Panda3D" is rarely thought of as an acronym any more.