Is Panda3D an acronym? I’ve heard somewhere that it stands for Platform Agnostic Networked Display Architecture 3D.
Yes, it does. Disney had a funny convention of creating names that were also acronyms.
Panda3D comes from a collection of libraries at Disney, including dtool, panda, pandatool, direct - it wasn’t considered Panda3D as a whole until it was open-sourced, I believe. PANDA meant Platform Agnostic Networked Display Architecture. Presumably the others were also acronyms. I heard an anecdote that DIRECT meant something like Disney’s Interactive Realtime Environment Construction Tools, but I don’t have a reliable source to confirm that.