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Roadmap

The project is organised around a compatibility ladder and a rendering quality loop. The current priority is a reliable playable world; fidelity is added only when it does not leave visible gaps or consume the frame budget.

Complete or substantially working

  • Luanti protocol, authentication, world state and server connection.
  • Movement prediction, digging, placing, inventory, formspecs, entities, sounds, weather and core particle paths.
  • Near-terrain regional batching and immutable multithreaded mesh builds.
  • Persistent far terrain, multi-tier LOD, server summaries and terrain occlusion.
  • Terrain Diffusion integration with a versioned downloadable default bake.
  • Godot lighting, Luanti light attributes, material defaults and authored LabPBR overrides, with independently versioned asset bundles.
  • FPS/position/performance diagnostics and local Start Game/Join Game flows.

Current priorities

1. Complete world coverage

The far field must present a continuous, conservative landscape before adding more detail. Seabeds should occlude underwater caves, unknown frontiers should close cleanly, and LOD replacement must keep the old mesh until the new mesh is ready. The server's asynchronous generation and streaming limits remain a separate backend concern; see far-rendering.md.

2. Atmospheric presentation

Volumetric valley mist and raymarched cumulus are now present. The clouds march a 3D noise body in the sky pass rather than the range-limited froxel grid, while local mist retains a quality off/low path for slower GPUs. Continue tuning both against day, night, weather, altitude and underwater scenes. The atmosphere must reveal silhouettes rather than hide the map behind a uniform white wall.

3. Material and lighting coverage

Finish the per-game material audit, tell apart nodes that share a texture, and validate more games and LabPBR packs. The far tiers already share the near shader. The working plan is pbr-plan.md.

4. Compatibility tail

Node texture animation (animated node tiles) and entity animation are in. Connected textures and the remaining particle and formspec behaviours are not. Each feature should be gated by the protocol/game capability it actually needs rather than by a Goanna-only assumption.

5. Shader-pack compatibility

Extend the working Iris compositor path, then decide which gbuffers features can be translated without creating a second material or lighting contract. See iris-compat.md.

Engineering constraints

  • Preserve Luanti gameplay and protocol semantics.
  • Keep transplanted Luanti code small, attributable and easy to refresh.
  • Bound memory, mesh queues and server generation work over long sessions.
  • Prefer one coherent lower-detail world to a high-detail world with holes.
  • Measure changes with deterministic fixtures and the in-game performance overlay before changing defaults.

Open questions and compatibility boundaries belong in the specialised design documents, not in a chronological implementation diary.