Billboarding is now supported in the core engine, paving the way for advanced particle systems. You can see a very basic screenshot on the images page.
Billboards are collected into ‘sets’ for culling, rendering and memory allocation. Billboards are taken from a set pool of precreated billboards, meaning creating and destroying billboards (within this pool limit) is inexpensive (an important consideration for particle systems). You can advise on the expected size of the set to avoid reallocations at runtime.
Billboards within a set also have coordinates relative to the set’s center, and sets are included in the scene by adding them to scene nodes, from which thery derive their position / orientation – this means billboard sets have the same hierarchical movement as entities allowing smart things like billboards or classes based on them to be attached by relative position to other scene (e.g. the source of smokeflare being the characters gun).
My next piece of work will be providing support classes using these billboards, including particle systems (which will use the Controller class hierarchy to implement effectors on particles such as gravity, colour change, faders etc) and lens flares.
In the immediate term though, I’m going to do a snapshot release (tomorrow). Phew. As always, enjoy. 8)