Time for an updated roadmap for the year 2020, oh boy!
In interest of combating the issues that oft plague roadmaps and time schedules, I took some suggestions and will bracket out the roadmap by means of priorities.
Instead of trying to hardline "this by march" or anything like that, we'll be detailing out TODOs and features that are on the radar, and their estimated priority. Because things can change, this can obviously mean that high priority stuff can move slower than low priority stuff, or a whole lot of low priority stuff gets shoved onto the shelves to focus on one single high priority thing, and anywhere in between.
So, here we go!
- Highest Priority
- Finishing out 4.0 and launching(duh)
- Finishing out the Torque Manager
- Asset Library
- RPKs, Examples, and Legacy Resource Conversion/Assetification
- Documentation pass to ensure it's all up to date
- High Priority
- Ongoing updates to Editor Suite
- Modern Layout option
- Biomes/Environment Editing Suite overhaul/refactor
- Updates to Material editor
- Terrain updates
- Physical Camera
- Ongoing updates to Editor Suite
- Medium Priority
- Global Illumination R&D
- Scriptable Render Pipeline
- Proper Occlusion Culling handling, likely SoftOcclude
- Stock Physics reimplemented as an API plugin like PhysX or Bullet for consistency/code reduction
- ECS research and proper initial implementation/Examples
- Updated Material system to better support editing/feature expansion
- Publishing mechanics for Torque Manager
- Lower Priority
- R&D into shifting the render pipeline to ConfettiFX The Forge
- Re-implement Light/Shadowmap caching but better
- New/better shadowmap filtering such as PCF
- More extensive use of threading throughout
- Baked Lightmapping
- Visual Editing of materials/scripts
- Object Pooling
- R&D into a StreamingScene for streaming in levels
- Finish out CSG editor work
- Options and Keybinds editors
- Ongoing cleanup/streamlining of main engine
- Move non-obligatory files out into modules/asset packs
- Improve DLL support to better facilitate plugins/alternate language builds
- Cleanup includes and possible use precompiled headers to improve compile times
Ongoing editor suite improvements, expanded tools, better performance and work into making the engine look even better.
4.0 should be quite an impressive jump up from where the engine was with 3.10, and 4.x.x will launch it to further heights.
As a bonus, because getting the Torque Manager out is a front-runner(as noted above) that'll facilitate people staying up to date both with happenings in the community and development, but also engine builds as well.
Which will let us be much more aggressive about pushing updates out if you can spot 'oh hey a new version' when you fire up the Manager and it's right bloody there
It also helps that 4.0 was a lot of major foundational change work, and everything above outside of some obvious big ones that aren't as main-runner like the The Forge work is all compounding work rather than big shifts like PBR or Assets were means we'll be able to be much more proactive and cadenced with updates.
We don't have to keep the grind going until 'this one major thing works', we can just go 'hey yo, it's 4.0.13 with a bunch of bugfixes' and let you guys decide if it's sufficient to upgrade to or not.
All in all, the future is looking pretty dang bright and lots of the above stuff has already had preliminary work put into it, so I'm super excited to explore where things go in 2020 with all of you
