Roadmap

[Josh]

I have a general idea of the major features I want to implement, and when. There are a lot of other smaller items that will be added when it is convenient, but these are the main headlning features I have in mind:

5.0.1

The 5.0.1 update in December will be a minor update with a lot of small enhancements and features to improve your experience. I don't want to start the next major feature before then, because there's probably a 50/50 chance it won't be finished before Christmas, and I don't want to just go silent for the rest of the year.

5.1

After Christmas, work will begin on Leadwerks 5.1. The main feature will involve moving the lighting into a deferred step. (Currently we use a clustered forward+ technique also used by id Software and Rainbow 6 Siege X.) I don't have to write a whole new renderer I mostly just have to rearrange some shader code. When I do this, the engine will be "in the shop" for perhaps six weeks, and I think there's maybe a 50% chance it will take a bit longer than that to clean up all the details.

This update also solves many secondary issues including easier development of custom shaders, simpler memory management, addition of vertex movement effects like wind, more control over volumetric lighting, easier implementation of new light types, etc.

5.2

The major feature in 5.2 is planned to be baked global illumination, combined with dynamic direct lighting. There are many options here I may delve into, depending on what kind of quality and performance this approach is able to deliver. This is an important feature for my own game I am developing, as I want our game to have high quality indirect lighting with fast performance.

5.3+

I have many other features in mind for continued development. Here are some of the main important ones, in no particular order:

• Non-solid brushes (splines and terrain patches)
• Rope physics
• Raycast vehicle physics
• Roads
• Vertex morphs loaded from glTF
• Sandboxed Lua modding API, for making your games safely moddable
• Intel graphics support
• LInux and Mac support
• C# programming support

Development is never 100% certain before you actually write each feature, and this plan is subject to change, as more information becomes available during development. This is not an all-inclusive list of every feature or improvement, just the main big ones that take the most time to implement.