I've taken parts in something like this in the past, it starts out nice and ends up a mess of spaghetti, especially if the main players get bored and move on or jump ship to another platform.
I personally think a much better community project would be coding a stable DX8 or DX9 enhanced Max2D module. Using the D3DXSPrite Object for all 2D rendering would provide a good speed increase and give you the Start and End batching improvements similar to the OGL equivilent. (Especially with the DX9 version.)
Coding a community engine would take forever, too many ideas, you wouldn't make everyone happy, etc.
Coding a community collection of self contained routines that perform a certain task would be ideal. :)
I personally think a much better community project would be coding a stable DX8 or DX9 enhanced Max2D module. Using the D3DXSPrite Object for all 2D rendering would provide a good speed increase and give you the Start and End batching improvements similar to the OGL equivilent. (Especially with the DX9 version.)
Coding a community engine would take forever, too many ideas, you wouldn't make everyone happy, etc.
Coding a community collection of self contained routines that perform a certain task would be ideal. :)