Beta Version roadmap

[jakubtomsu]

Beta Info

The beta will mark a version that's relatively stable to develop on. The current alpha version is usable but major API changes are still in progress. There will be changes after the beta but not "wild west" anymore.

General

• Polish asset hot reloading
• Polish code hot reloading
• Parallelization
  • Job system package
  • Parallelize core of the engine
• Scene format refactor
  • Skeletal mesh support
  • Animation support
  • Proper blender plugin
• Dev inspector tools overhaul
• GUI package
• Proper asset pipeline
  • Make load_* APIs consistent
  • Support some form of asset building in build package (pak files?)
• Audio engine QOA support
  • On the fly decoding
  • Asset pipeline

Graphics

• Default pixel shader variants - opaque, clip, clip dithered
• Skeletal mesh support
  • Pose blending system
• New font rendering
  • Unicode support
  • CP437 atlas support
  • Slug rendering for TTF fonts
• Shadow pass support
• Transparent object re-batching

Support

• Proper Linux support
• Full SDL3 fallback availability in all packages
  • gpu_sdl3 backend
• Polish web exports
  • Asset loading

Documentation

• Cheatsheet
• Package docs
• Live web demos

[jakubtomsu]

I've been thinking about automating documentation generation with odin doc. I'm not sure a complete documentation is that important for a Beta version. However we need discoverability of the APIs, so a single document as a one big overview of the engine seems like a good idea. Maintaining that by hand gets tedious, and especially since Odin has the standardized doc format we should make use of it.

For example we could have a little odin program to generate a nice cheatsheet in markdown format. That's one of the things I like the most about raylib, it's so easy to search for stuff in their cheatsheet. PICO-8 has similar docs but with more info for each procedure.

Alternatively we could potentially use the https://pkg.odin-lang.org/ generator, though I think I would prefer a simple HTML/markdown file instead.