1. Access to the shaders pipline.
2. Access to other parts of the rendering pipeline not yet implemented in irrlicht so you can do your own stuff if necessary (and ofcourse mess up badly).
3. Speed optimizations in the rendering engine (or wherever optimizations can be done
4.
I'd say the only thing I see as essential to make the engine better in all departments is image quality. I don't think I'm alone in noticing that images displayed can be somewhat blurred, although I'm not sure whether this is limited to 2D images or mesh textures as well. If the latter is true then it would be a big increase in quality and surely be far more benificial than additional features.
As for speed, personally I haven't had any loading issues, it looks far faster than some projects I have seen with Ogre.
I guess the bluriness of the picutres depend on the sampling teqnique you use when rendering. I haven't checked if you can change that. But if you can't you should be able to do that.
The other thing I noticed is that if you see a quality problem on 3d object, turn off mip-mapping, and be sure to user Power of Two (2,4,8,32,256,512...etc) sized images.
Never noticed a problem with texture quality in 3D, it's just no matter what I do I can't get 2D images to display without a severe drop in quality. Just thought maybe this could extend to 3D textures as well.
Integrating Cg would be very usefull, in that case , all the eyecandy stuff could be do.
I think remodulate the material way would be very usefull to, allow mesh to have more than 1 uvset and more than two texture blend...
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I guess CG is hard to have since that is NVidia specific. But the normal DX shaders would of course work. But I guess there has to be another interface for OpenGL shaders.
+ Support for loading .x files with more than 1 texture
+ Skeletal joint control for .x models
+ a void * in SceneNode (I know I could add this myself but im lazy :p)
+ Improvement to the ellipse collision so you can set the maximum step size ellipses can climb (for big steps! at the moment it is proportional to the ellipse size which is causing me trouble)
And most of all:
+ Build in support for reading BSP entitys - preferably with a complete point entity set & SUPPORT FOR READING BRUSH ENTIYS
I'd like to see something like a SpecialFX Scenenode, kind of like
blah->addAnimator(...);
but:
blah->addSpecialFX(myshadernode);
or something like that so you can attach specific special effects to objects to achieve things like individual motion blur and shader effects, while having child objects selectivly inherit these effects.
I'd like to see better collision detection management. I created my own terrain scene node, then loaded the data into a octTree and the collision detection for about 3200 triangles brought the frame rate to 160fps, when i did my own collision I got about 850fps.