Hi Firefax,
nice to hear from you!
We're working like hell on finishing our vegetation system as soon as possible!
However we're also working on many other new items and features as well, which in turn slows the vegetation-related work a bit down.
(The support for 64-bit platforms has already been announced in the
News, and more very important feature announcements will follow there very soon. Please subscribe to the
Cafu 
RSS news feed in order keep up-to-date with the latest news.)
Indeed, our vegetation system will technically be similar to that of SpeedTree by IDV, but without the steep price: The core component of a vegetation system is the LoD (level-of-detail) technique, and we've been able to come up with great implementations of our own.
Initially, the Cafu vegetation system will certainly be somewhat simpler than IDV's SpeedTree, as ours is new, whereas theirs is years old and polished. However, we're confident that once our implementation is complete, artists will be able to come up with great plant textures and programmers will easily be able to write code for exploiting the latest hardware features.
