Will Malt Development continue now that Miguel and Goo Studios are working with Blender for NPR

[yusrig]

Hey so just saw that Goo Studios and even Miguel (who I think is the main dev of Malt, correct me if I am wrong) are going to be working on developing some native NPR tools for blender Foundation. Does this mean Malt will slowly be phased out or continue to run side by side?

Just curious I suppose.

[pragma37]

Hi! Sorry for the late reply, I've been away from development stuff for the holidays.

Malt has been in "maintenance mode" for about 2 years now.
It's updated to work on the latest Blender version and for the occasional bug fix, and it will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future.

The original/main goal of Malt was to provide an extensible framework to develop NPR techniques in an "as easy as possible" way, and I consider the project "finished" in that sense.
Any major improvement in that direction would require upgrading to Vulkan to have access to the latest GPU capabilities (like ray tracing).
This is something I toy around with from time to time as I'd personally really like to have it, but Vulkan is so hostile to the "as easy as possible" concept that it's hard to say if that development would lead to a "Malt 2.0" or to something else.

I think if everything goes right with the NPR Blender project, most Malt users using it as an "off the shelf" engine may likely want to switch to it, though.