I will describe a bit here what is planned next for the first quarter of the new year 2007.
The next release [0.8.0] will soon be published and has a plenty of nice improvements. One thing is an improved shadow mapping implementation. The performance for scenes with shadows has more than doubled while the quality is also quite a bit better than before. Many modifications have been done to the Collada converter which is now compatible with dae files exported from Blender and supports assets with several skin modifiers. The scene management has been improved quite a bit. Bones are now part of the scene graph which means that you can attach objects to them and modify the bone positions for dynamic animations. Furthermore there is a new function to access and read the geometry data of scene nodes. This makes it possible to use Horde in combination with a collision or physics library. Another thing to mention is the support for dynamic texture updates which is especially useful for augmented reality applications. Last but not least I have added some getter-functions which return attributes and parameters of the engine objects.
Much work has been done for this release and all in all I think that it improves greatly the productivity and quality of the engine. If things continue like this I'm quite sure that Horde will soon become a really powerful and competitive graphics engine.
The next three months will be dedicated to our CeBit 2007 project. We will present an augmented reality application with user tracking and a talking character who interacts with the user. For this reason I will improve the animation system. Planned are features like animation blending and mixing and improvements to the animation pipeline in general. Maybe we will also use particle systems but that's not yet certain. Having such a project usually gives a productivity boost to our whole team so I hope that in the end some nice new features will come out for Horde3D.
So far on the plans for the near future. Comments are kindly welcome...