Blender Development crisis

[farsthary]

Hello everyone
IMO the development of blender is in a crisis because to much patchs, features , works etc are exeding the capacity of integration into the official release. (is good to have much things but i consider the problen is the organisation) also , in the official web page I never could see the release cycle status (is always in B-con 1!) Many web sites are off date , even in the 2.45 release notes are for 2.3x series!

What about volumetrics for blender? the only thing that keeps me with Ligthwave is its incredible HyperVoxel tecnology , I know is slow, and not used very often, bla,bla.
But for many things its simply IMPOSSIBLE to fake volumetrics and we must pay the price in time, I think some feature could not be keep away for time reasons. Blender have abando this branch intentionally.

I want to thank Letter Rip for his active participaion in forums and I always serch for his advice.
I hope someone put this fears of me away because I love Blender and I would not like to see that some distro from Alaska (for example) have better features that the official release, and have to search for all Internet to find some patch usefull for me.

[kAinStein]

Hello everyone
IMO the development of blender is in a crisis because to much patchs, features , works etc are exeding the capacity of integration into the official release. (is good to have much things but i consider the problen is the organisation) also , in the official web page I never could see the release cycle status (is always in B-con 1!) Many web sites are off date , even in the 2.45 release notes are for 2.3x series!

Really?

http://www.blender.org/development/rele ... ender-245/
http://www.blender.org/development/rele ... ender-244/
...
And so on... *coughs*

What about volumetrics for blender? the only thing that keeps me with Ligthwave is its incredible HyperVoxel tecnology , I know is slow, and not used very often, bla,bla.
But for many things its simply IMPOSSIBLE to fake volumetrics and we must pay the price in time, I think some feature could not be keep away for time reasons. Blender have abando this branch intentionally.

It might be that it does not have any priority...

Take a look into the Dev-Wiki to see what is abandoned, what is active and what is currently on ice.

[kAinStein]

Oh! I forgot to mention something that might be of interest for you.

A few weeks ago Ton told me that (original quote) " the release cycle process has to be streamlined" and that it is being discussed how that can be achieved. This backs up your feeling to some point and should show that there the problem already has been noticed and is going to be solved - though it is not as bad as you might think. So crisis isn't the right word for it...

[jesterKing]

Since we started using SVN we have moved lots of the development into branches ( http://projects.blender.org/plugins/scm ... bf-blender ). This is done to make sure that very experimental features don't mess with the main trunk. There's quite a lot of effort in keeping the branches in sync with the main trunk, as to ensure that when the time is ripe merging of these new features to trunk goes fairly smooth.

edit:

On the topic of 'intentionally' abandoning. Since this is open source, most of the features 'fall' when their main (and often only) developer cannot commit enough time to it for whatever reason. Don't forget that most of the people working on the code do it in their free time. It is just a fact you'll have to live with. If you really need it, and you know how to program, you can pick up where development was left. Alternatively wait for someone to continue (or get someone to continue).

/Nathan