I’m not sure of the scope for 1.2, or when something like this would be considered, but there is a desire to see changes in the painting algorithm. We’ve discussed this in other topics before, regarding using sprites, or disks, or polygons to fill in more space with fewer points without having to break out Box#3 or similar. Any ideas on when something like this would be considered?
The thing is we haven’t set anything in stone for 1.2 except that we want to attack the Holy Grail of today’s computing, multi-threading and multi-core support for upcoming generations of hardware. (read: MORE PERFORMANCE! :o)
But, as Mark Wiebe pointed out in an internal meeting already, the scope of 1.1 was “advanced Thinking Particles support and bug fixes”, but look how that turned out - we put in as much TP support we could get out of the TP SDK, then fixed a lot of things that weren’t exactly on the 1.2 agenda.
That’s why we wanted to hear your wishes for 1.2, who knows what will or not end up in it… If we can find ways to get two, four or eight CPUs drawing at the same time (with respective speed up of drawing performance), it might be worth it to do something similar to the DOF effect to draw a single particle as a cloud of points when seen up close or things like that… Just speculating myself, no promises. ;o)