Acron and Panda3D

Acron is built on Panda3D 1.11 and keeps its design: a program written for Panda3D reads the same in Acron once its imports are renamed. This page lists what differs, for readers who know Panda3D, and for anyone reading Panda3D’s books, forum posts and samples alongside this manual.

Names

The engine’s modules, classes and libraries carry Acron’s name where Panda3D’s carry its own, by one rule: Panda3D becomes Acron, and panda becomes acron in the same letter case. direct keeps its name.

Panda3D	Acron
import panda3d.core, panda3d.bullet, …	import acron.core, acron.bullet, …
PandaNode, PandaSystem, PandaFramework	AcronNode, AcronSystem, AcronFramework
pandaFramework.h, libpanda, pandagl	acronFramework.h, libacron, acrongl
from direct.showbase.ShowBase import ShowBase	the same

Models, .egg and .bam files carry over: Acron reads .bam files written by Panda3D, whose nodes are named PandaNode.

A package from PyPI that imports panda3d does not find the engine under that name. The ones most games need are part of Acron already:

On PyPI	In Acron
panda3d-gltf	acron.gltf; glTF files load with no import (glTF Files)
panda3d-simplepbr	acron.simplepbr (Materials and PBR)
panda3d-blend2bam	acron.blend2bam; .blend files load directly (Converting from Blender)

Getting the Engine

Panda3D is installed with pip install panda3d or an SDK installer. Acron is installed per project by the Acron launcher, from the Acron archive, with an Acron account (see Installing Acron). There are no SDK installers, and the acron package on PyPI is an unrelated project.

The Python wheels are built for Python 3.14 only, for 64-bit Windows, macOS 11 or later on Apple silicon, 64-bit Linux on x86-64, the web and 64-bit ARM Android. C++ games use prebuilt SDKs per platform with a CMake package (see Building C++ Games for the Desktop); the engine is never compiled by a game developer.

What Acron Adds

Platforms. Games ship to the web (WebAssembly and WebGL 2, from Python or C++: see The Web), to Android with touch screens and the system Back button (see Building for Android), and to the Nintendo Wii, with its own GX renderer, Wii Remote input and audio (see Building for the Wii). One machine builds every platform’s version of a game.

Engine modules.

• RmlUi: user interfaces in HTML and CSS, with touch and gamepad navigation (RmlUi).

• ENet: reliable UDP networking for games (ENet Networking).

• A Verlet ragdoll solver (Ragdoll Solver).

• Gaussian splats: a native sorter (Gaussian Splat Sorter) under the Python splat renderer (Gaussian Splats).

• TouchGamepad: a gamepad drawn on a touch screen, so a game written for gamepads plays on a phone (The touch gamepad).

• The Vulkan renderer, shipped in the Python wheels (Renderers).

The acron framework. A Python package of game mechanisms the engine did not have: a fixed-step game loop, kinematic character movers, input actions, a camera boom, menus and HUDs, PBR materials, animation blending, 2D tile maps and sprites, saving, testing, and a layer for porting Godot games. See The acron Game Framework.

Tooling. The launcher creates, runs and updates projects; acronmanager builds a project’s assets, runs its tests and packages it for every platform, makes its app icons and store art (App Icons and Store Art) and writes its CI workflow (Continuous Integration for Games); Acron Studio is the editor. build_apps targets the platforms Acron publishes wheels for (see Building Python Games).

Smaller changes. A new window clears to purple, not grey (background-color 0.22 0.173 0.431); the filled wireframe is cyan and the framework’s highlight yellow.