You might be wondering where the Blender 2.63 release has been hanging out. Well behind the scenes of the start of the new Blender Foundation Open Movie (Mango), the developers have been working hard on getting the next release of Blender prepped. The development process is in the BCon3 stage right now, which means that bugs are being fixed and the release is getting stabilized. No new features are being added at this point, since all the big ones have already been merged. Here are the features that have made it in.
Although a couple of major features were planned for this release, only two have made it through this iteration. Those two are partial visibility in sculpt mode (along with some other patches for sculpt mode), and the much anticipated Bmesh update! Finally we will have n-gons in Blender. The merge process for Bmesh happened back in February but lots of bug-fixing has continued to get it properly working and stable. Import and export scripts have been updated (and some new ones have even been written recently) so it looks like Blender is ready to work with the new mesh editing system.
If you are curious as to other projects that haven't been put into this upcoming release check out the projects page on the Blender wiki. It lists a number of projects that are still awaiting review or need some further development and documentation. The biggest block with integrating new features is finding someone to review all the code and making sure it is working properly. The second biggest problem is making sure there is proper documentation for the feature.
The release candidate is about to be released (sometime in the next week) so stay tuned to see what the latest version of Blender looks like! We can look forward to the final release sometime during the next two weeks.
Update: It looks like the Release Candidate won't be out till after Easter, but the Final release is still scheduled for sometime in the next two weeks.
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