---- The engine is in a beta stage with a good stability and fonctionnality meaning we are near to an official version release.
---- About Development team we still have only :
1 Core developer
1 Addon Developer
3 additional developers ( 2 new guys join the Dev team)
---- After vote here viewtopic.php?f=5&t=308 we come out with a kind of exicting roadmap.
Dade wrote: ↑Thu May 10, 2018 9:36 am And the winner is...
- Light cache Part II: to accelerate indirect light sampling
- Light cache Part I: to accelerate direct light sampling in scenes with many light sources
- Walt Disney Principled Shader material
- Displacement (micro, vector, volume)
- Unbiased Photon Gathering for Light Transport Simulation and anditional photon mapping related techniques
- Terminator Artifact Treatment
- Support for a native hair primitive to accelerate hair/fur rendering
- Support for multiple UV sets for each mesh vertex
- New Glossy material with multiple scattering GGX, Irridescent microfacets, etc.
- Normals auto-smooth
- etc.
Here is the problem :
Now as you must notice many people inside and outside the project have they eyes locked to the project waiting for some features to be implemented. But for some obvious reason features like this are time consuming and require heavy ressources.
Due to the relative small size of the community and Development team size it's hard to have a normal ROADMAP with clear visibility of target and kind of deadline that you can see in big opensource project like Blender/Ubuntu ...
Developer are volunteer and they work on the project on they free time. they are normal human being like you with familly and real life problem. the meaning of this is that you can wait for feature most of the time longer than expected as it is a small opensource project with limited ressources.
The solution
Time is money = money can be also converted in time. Yes money ! there is no successfull opensource project without solid funds support (Blender is the best example)
https://fund.blender.org/
THat said My idea is : crowdfunding.
We are arround 300 registered users. Sure all theses 300 are NOT active users. But if we can target something like 5$ -- 20$ /month / users with a global fund target of 10.000$/month (maybe 5000$/month ) and increase it as the project involve.
This is in my opinion a very feasable things with lot of advantage for users and Devs :
Users will have a fast develoment. faster renderer. ADD (artist driven development). for only a tiny $$ relative to what they put in hardware.really think that 60$ per years on a fast/robust/free renderer is better than 450$ on a new CPU/GPU to speed up a slow engine
.
What do you thinks ? CC are welcome !