Current state of Jade
(this post is also written on the Jade forums, in this thread)
This post is not going to be a very positive post for most people probably, but I don't think things are going to change much in the near future, so let's go.
Currently we have 2 branches in Jade: Jade 1.X (based on Haddd) and Jade 2. When I released Jade 1.0 a team of people assembled around the engine to help on it (I won't post names here because I'm sure I would forgot someone who has helped and I don't want to). Our objective at that time was to finish Jade 1.X missing parts and polish it. The work was directed towards 3 things: animation, importing and a game editor. We never finished any of those 3 things (although there was quite a lot of work done on all of them). There were several factors involved on this (MDX dying, it was hard to interact in an editor with Jade,...), but in the end we decided to stop working on the Jade 1.X branch and make a new engine from the ground: Jade 2.
Jade 2 started very nicely, with a lot of development done, specially in the engine core and the plugins library (Pluto). But after some time the developer team started to have less time to work on the engine. I have to blame myself for this as I slacked a lot during the start of Jade 2 (no excuses here). It's true there are some things in the works: gonzo is preparing a Jade 1.2 release, several students are doing their projects to extend Jade and I'm writing some Ai namespaces. But nothing is related to the the graphic core of Jade 2 (and that's the most important thing for people following or who plan to use the engine).
So, this is what I was planning to do given the current situation. To keep advancing Jade 2 we would need to find some graphic programmers with a good level on the subject of engine design. We would walk them on the engine internals, tasks that need to be done, how things work and why,... I have played with the idea of doing that myself, but I have no strength to learn 3D graphics programming at the level that is needed. Also, as I don't have much free time lately and I don't spend much of it on Jade, I don't want to search contributors until I know that I will have a decent activity again. My idea is to continue working on the new Ai libraries, writing code and small demos and when I feel that I have advanced that part enough (and I'm more free), try to find some people interested on helping with the 3D code.
And that's how things are right now. Do not think the project is dead (far from it), but for some time it is going to advance at a very slow rate. Opinions are really welcomed on this subject :)