Note that in the past, it was very difficult to build panda. Things have improved. It is now fairly straightforward to download and compile panda. In particular, this is a sensible thing to do if you wish to add some functionality to panda.

To avoid possible consistency problems, the documentation for building the source is included with the source, not in the manual. Download a source package from the panda website, then look in the directory "doc," where you will find two files: INSTALL-MK and INSTALL-PP. These contain the instructions on the two different build-systems, "makepanda" and "ppremake".

Having built from source, Python can be configured to let you import Panda3D modules as if they were installed in site-packages. Create a file called panda3d.pth inside your site-packages directory containing something similar to the following (this example is for Linux):

/opt/panda3d/built /opt/panda3d/built/lib

The two entries should be on separate lines. Note that this assumes the built version of Panda3D has been moved or copied to /opt/panda3d.

In addition to this path file, create a file __init__.py and save it into the "built" directory, or /opt/panda3d/built as in this example for Linux. This file can be empty. Without, Python will not be able to locate the Panda3D modules.

Note that I only tested this under Linux.