Just wondering if anyone knows the real state of 3Delight development. It seems to come to a complete stop. They're sample page hasn't been updated since 2010 and the current version has many debilitating bugs which keeps me from switching to it permanently.

I was just about to buy a license, just waiting for a few aggravating (but not major) issues to be fixed but then development seemed to fade away.

There seems to be almost no action on their forum. This is a shame because I thought it was really promising.

Have they pretty much thrown in the towel? Is there not enough interest or revenue?

Can anyone cast a light on this situation?

Maybe you looked at the wrong page. The latest update showed up last month on their free downloads (two months after the customers got it).

Here's the change log for 2012:

3.1.10 - 2012-05-15
Features
Timings in statistics now properly work in multi-threading.
Added a CAMERA tag that can be resolved in file names.

3.1.9 - 2012-04-30
Fixed version number problem in previous package.

3.1.8 - 2012-04-28
Fixed a memory leak.

3.1.7 - 2012-04-13 (DO NOT USE)
Accelerated ray-tracing of curves. Curves with many segments ray-trace twice as fast.

3.1.6 - 2012-04-12 (DO NOT USE)
Features
Fixed degradation of multi-threading performance with very dense scenes (such as scenes containing hair and fur).

3.1.5 - 2012-03-28
Features
Fur/Hair intensive render use 25% less memory.
Camera interest can be used in as the focal distance in depth of field parameters.
Shaders
added mib_color_alpha shader.

3.1.4 - 2012-03-06
Features
Subdivision surfaces take less memory and render faster.
Improved multi-threading of texture and point-clouds access.
Fixes
Fixed bug when Shadow Caster Switch dosent work properly with the shadow shader (#3437).
Fixed a problem when using dicing cameras and shadow maps (#3420).

3.1.3 - 2012-02-10
Features
Accelerated ray-tracing of curves.

3.1.2 - 2012-01-25
Features
Diffuse and specular intensity multipliers of light are animatable and not limited to 0-1 (#3481).
Fixes
3DFS Light properties can now be animated (#3480).
Fixed sub-samples properties of lights.
Fixed ambient in misss shaders, it wasn’t overridden by scene ambience.
Fixed point-based occlusion and GI on transparent objects. Transparent objects will now let light pass as they should.

3.1.1 - 2012-01-23
Features
Hugely accelerated baking stage. Speedups can reach 400% on multi-core machines.
Ability to use presets in co-shaders using shader annotations.
Add a lightsource property to multiply diffuse and specular intensity (#3453).
Fixes
Fixed AOVs. Basically, compositiing the standard AOVs together will lead to the correct “beauty” image.

I've renewed my license last month, also I'm playing with Matt Ebb's Blender to 3delight exporter. Imho the main advantage of this type of renderer is a Renderman shading language. Let's say, with some basic knowledge and a bit of willing to learn, it's possible to do a lot of own stuff. No need for C++, at least to some level.
Fancy design seems to be somewhat unusual, I don't believe the site design belongs to any member of dev team

Maybe I was. Just wondering since there was nothing posted since May. Then I saw a note on the website to the effect that the beta for 3 was over. I remember testing 3.1 and then 3.10 (other versions were not posted for the public) and none of the issues I was having were fixed, there was no response to the issues I posted on the forum, so I just kind of gave up on it.

I hope development is continuing (it's hard to tell from their site) because I think it was the best alternative of any renderer inside SI as far as integration.

Two of the most significant issues I was having were 3Delight was always converting textures to it's own format every time I did a test render no matter the settings (even though it had done it many times before) which of course is quite painful if you have a lot of large textures.

The volume rendering is not correct (or even close) and seems to be using the wrong scale values. Anyway, it was all posted on their forum to no response.

Too bad because I liked it a lot overall. I was hoping to switch to it for the majority of work but not as is. I'm hoping...

Happened to me too, even if the texture sync was set to off it kept converting them, quite annoying.

Yes, it's obviously just a simple tag that's not registering but the problem has been there for at least a year or more.

It looks like either they forgot to code for it or it is done on purpose.
Maybe it's a hidden restriction on the free version (which is what I use).

Same thing happens on the paid version. I believe the only difference with the paid version is the number of cores you can use.

I posted again on their forum but no response yet. This is what worries me about continued development. Either they're very busy making it awesome and usable (which is fine) or they've wondered off and left it as is (which of course is disconcerting).

I hope it's the first

in that case I would recommend mailing support directly instead of using the forum. http://www.3delight.com/en/index.php?page=contact