Panda3D is an open source 3D Engine originally developed, and still
actively maintained, by the Walt Disney VR Studio.  Additional
development and support for the open source community is provided by
the Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University.

At the present, we are providing two completely unrelated systems for
building Panda.  The original build system, ppremake, is still in
active use by the VR Studio, and is useful if you want advanced build
control. The other build system, makepanda, is designed to build
quickly and painlessly, and is used to generate the official releases.

The ppremake system is a makefile generator, and allows you to
configure your build environment to a high degree of customization.
It is a fairly complex build system, and it requires some comfort with
using the command-line make utilities.

The makepanda system is a Python script that directly invokes the
compiler to build the Panda sources.  Its emphasis is on providing a
hands-off, simple approach to building Panda.

Both systems may require you to first install a number of third-party
tools if you would like to make them available for Panda, such as
FreeType or OpenSSL.  You may also download a zip file that contains
precompiled versions of these third-party libraries from the Panda
website, which is especially useful when used in conjunction with the
makepanda system.

If you are interested in compiling Panda for yourself, you are welcome
to use either build system.  Please refer to the documents INSTALL-PP
or INSTALL-MK, in this directory, for build instructions for ppremake
and makepanda, respectively.  You may also be interested in
downloading the prebuilt Panda3D binaries from the Panda website at
http://www.panda3d.org/ .
