Ziboo
Will Houdini Engine support runtime one day ? soon ?
1. One day runtime support might be possible. But not soon. As you can imagine, there are licensing issues to sort out besides just the technical.
Ziboo
Will you support Instanced Indirect for instancing geometry on points for maximum performance ?
2. We'll have packed primitive and object instancing support (see this page
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/hengine/_h_a_p_i__instancing.html). With object instancing, you can specify either Houdini object nodes or existing Unity gameobjects in the project.
Ziboo
Does every user of Unity needs Houdini installed on their machine ?
3. Depends. As long as the user is not manipulating the parameters of an HDA in Unity, there is no reason to have Houdini installed. They can work with the output gameobject data. If they do need to modify the parameters to generate different output, then yes, they will need to have it installed or access to it via network. Baking outputs allows you to strip away the Houdini Engine components and completely eliminate the need for it, so that is a way to ensure that they don't try to modify parameters. The updated version of the plugin will allow you to update previously baked out prefabs and existing baked out gameobjects (non-prefabs) so that you can have a workflow where the HDA and its outputs can be completely separate, but able to be re-linked when need to update. And this update can happen without being destructive to other components that you added (within reason).