Forums » Impact Engine » Possibility for a Roadmap

@Dom, you've got a lot of good feedback going on here, and we're beginning to form a bit of community with collaborative troubleshooting etc. Also you've been insanely active here.

A lot of us are up for working on things that are not finished in impact as is. For example I'm working on Cloning Zelda: link to the past onto impact as my learner project. I'm working now on making the lighting effect/lamp mask for the underground dungeon levels. Its got me looking into a lot of lighting effects, and a way to do it other then just moving a giant opaque mask around with a hole in it.... I digress.

It would be really interesting/helpful to know the items that you have on your personal roadmap. Not with any definite time frames so that nobody bothers you about release dates... but just to know that if I have three issues, and you already plan on working on one of them, then I could tackle the other two and hope to not duplicate effort.

Thoughts?

I hate to say it, but I still have a really hard time figuring this out.

When you are not building a game, you somewhat lose track of what might be nice to have in the engine - on the other hand, when you are building a game, your requirements seem to be the most important thing ever. I.e. this lighting/effects layer never crossed my mind till now (I'm not saying it's not important; I myself just haven't had any use for it so far).

I also want to keep the engine itself lean and provide additional functionality through plugins. So, beside the usual bugfixes and small improvements:

- Foreground maps
- An easy way to create menus
- Introduce a "Server Mode" to run Impact on nodejs or similar platforms.
- Local savegames/highscores using cookies or local storage
- Pathfinding (probably as a plugin)

For 2.x:
- Some way to manage game states (i.e. title screen, game, credits etc.)
- Complete overhaul of Weltmeister: use a "fullscreen" mode, update the UI and make it consistent, clean up the source
- Isometric background maps

Dominic,

Thanks a ton for that reply. For example, two of the items on your tentative list (menus and pathfinding), are also on my list for the game. However, on my list at least they are accompanied by about another 8 items. So in this case I'll tackle the other 6 first, hoping that by the time I get to the last two you've already done them.

Again, this is not in any way supposed to pressure you, its just hedging my bets since I've got other things I can work on at the same time.

Thanks again for the awesome work...

Can't wait for the 2.x release, keep up with all the great works Dominic

I think that introducing the concept of plugins has and will go a long way towards helping people get what they want out of ImpactJS.

As members of the community help fill in some of the gaps by generously sharing plugins, you can focus on the bigger picture stuff (like Weltmeister) and other "core" things. You basically get to have things both ways. You get to improve the foundation, and when you're working on a game and have a very specific need, you can pursue satisfying that need by writing a plugin.

I think the concept of plugins is only missing one thing: a tutorial on how to write one that goes a bit beyond just showing source code.

Agreed with above post

Teach us how to write a simple plugin - eg a dialog box for characters ( like in a 16 bit game) would be awesome

I personally would love to see some better font controls, or maybe a plugin that handles this. Allowing multiple fonts in one string, wrapping lines etc... would be rad.

But it is as said, you only think of the things you need when you need them.

I was thinking of starting a plugin/feature request thread, where we can all post our ideas. I've got a few i'd like to see thought about by others too.

Also, Dominic, I've started some additions to my version of Weltmeister, thinking of making them available. Any objections?

@dominic: Are there any news regarding the "server mode"? Being able to use collision detection and such on a node.js server and having the clients just do the rendering would be awesome.

Any plans for creating a GUI for the entities so we could edit animation sheets (pngs) directly in the editor? I'm trying to think of something that isn't game specific that everyone could benefit from.