I’ve been asked to post an update of what is upcoming in the engine, here it is:
- I’m enhancing the particle systems to support directional particles as well as point particles, to make my rainstorms look nicer and to support laser beams, tracer fire etc
- Automatic SceneNode animation, very much like the texture animation support already in but allowing constant movement and rotation of nodes without application involvement including following bezier and b-spline paths. Useful for demo making!
- Mesh animation support, both traditional keyframe and skeletal animation; this has already been looked at a little by a potential new team member but I plan to help it a long a bit
- Reimplement VIPM (view independent progressive mesh) which I took out of the model classes 18 months ago due to the redesign that began OGRE’s life and never got around to putting back. Maybe even consider generating a normal/bumpmap as in the upcoming Doom3?
- A full Linux port is planned, temas is doing most of the work on this
- Collision detection and response framework, presently being worked on by another potential new team member
- Hopefully we can get a geomipmapping terrain plugin to replace the ROAM plugin which was too CPU-limited; Cearny was looking into this last I heard but he’s been out of contact for a while
Hope that clears things up – as you can see there’s a lot to do. Animation support and collision detection are top of the TODO list right now (even though VIPM is getting my attention again now) since they will be crucial to a real use of the engine in a game/demo.