[Bf-committers] Blender 2.8 - priorities reconsideration proposal

[Dalai Felinto]

Dear all,

While we are strong in our goal to release Blender 2.8 next year, we kept
adding project targets for it at a growing pace. Now it is the time to go
back and reconsider our priorities.

Blender 2.8 is not ready for production work yet. This makes the timing not
right for the development to drive enough interest from everyone. And it
doesn’t make sense to pursuit the new Blender without our users and
volunteers to push the design of core components further.

Therefore we are removing from current 2.8 technical targets:

* Top bar
* Manipulators
* Tools
* Workspace specific keymaps, add-ons.
* 101

Manipulators and tools will still be around as an API for add-ons. So users
can still experiment with custom manipulators, facemaps and the tool
system.

That also means we can focus our strength on wrapping up the following
projects:

* Finish workspaces (move object mode to workspace and polish interface)
* Collections, layers (user interface and groups)
* Eevee (feature polishing, performance)
* Drawing engines (Workbench engine)
* Modes (move settings to workspace, final overlay settings design)
* OpenGL offline render
* Multi-window (OpenGL non-shared resources manager)
* Static ID Override (replace proxies)
* Asset/preset browsing
* Templates (built-in support as with 2.79, none distributed by default).
* Grease pencil objects (draw engine, tools)
* Dependency graph improvements + copy on write
* Dynamic overrides

We are not removing the targets that won’t be part of the initial release
Blende 2.8. We expect to resume working on them throughout the 2.8 series.

Best regards,
Dalai
--
blendernetwork.org/dalai-felinto
www.dalaifelinto.com