Our list of items to fix is generated by testers like you that exercise the code to do your work.
As you find and report problems, we can assess if they are egregious enough to postpone release. When the list of known problems is small enough and minor enough they can be fixed with a later service release, it’s ready for Beta release.
Then more people will be attracted to use it and more critical, real-life testing will occur.
Sometimes the requests are too ambitious for the next upcoming release and they get pushed off for future development.
Right now we’re concentrating on getting the Software Development Kit that other developers use to write plug-ins, completed, and “frozen” so they can begin their development work. Rhino with no plug-ins isn’t useful to many people.
This is the process we use to develop Rhino, and why it is impossible to give a release date.
There are a few major parts of Rhino that still need to be finished up before we release:
The SDK, as John Brock mentioned
Annotation: We’ve added more flexible styling and support for rich text throughout all our annotation objects.
Display: We’ve been completely reworking the way Rhino displays your model in the viewports. Our goal is to provide a faster, more stable display, while building a foundation that allows us to add cool features in the future.
There are also quite a few bugs on the list that we’d like to squish before we release Rhino for sale.
Here’s an overview of the major work we’ve done for Rhino 6. Much of it is complete, and Rhino seems to be coming together now. We never make promises about release dates, because we prefer to have Rhino work well when we launch instead of hitting an arbitrary release date.
@brian That overview is a major breakthrough in customer communication for McNeel! It looks like “lack of resources” no longer prevents you from keeping up with the big boys. Keep up the good work.