Well, I was planning to rewrite the terrain model generation function to group the nodes in an octree, but it looks like you are well ahead of me! Those framerates sound fantastic ynjh_jo, and thanks for the hints drwr 
I think I get the gist of what you have done with the terrain generation, but I won’t be sure I understand it until I can run the code and visualize your collision terrain. I’ll try it out next time I’m at my (fast) computer.
I have been working on improvements of my own, making the demo interactive through mouse-clicks to control the characters, and updating the obstacle avoidance behaviour from the last version. It’s simple enough with the existing code in vehicle.py to get some obstacles into the scene and get the characters avoiding them, but although I think the steering is fine the collision detection routines I wrote for it are not too robust I feel it needs to be updated to work with Panda’s collision detection system instead, which I’m starting to get the hamg of. I should have a significant update before too long. In the meantime, feel free to jump ahead of me
Thanks again for getting involved! You’ve really improved this code. When it’s finished I think this code could be a really great thing to have available on the forums. As well as the instructive steering behaviours demo and code for reuse, I could put together an example game using it. I’m thinking of a scene with some terrain, trees, buildings, streetlamps, etc., and about 12 characters with different models wandering around (or maybe it could be some sort of weird clone town of Ralph people). The player controls one character by pointing and clicking and the camera follows, and the player can walk up to any of the non-player characters and initiate a ‘conversation’, which would be drawn in speech bubbles using DirectGUI. The player could give the NPCs instructions like ‘Follow character X’, ‘Chase character X’, ‘Run away from character X’, ‘Go get X and bring it/him/her to me’, etc. So it wouldn’t really be much of a game, but it would be a pretty good base on which to build an adventure-style game.