dusk/ROADMAP.md

Dusk Roadmap

Tracking upcoming milestones for the engine.

Upcoming milestones

1. Add a very basic physics engine, moving away from the current tile-based movement.
2. Give entities full freedom of movement (no longer locked to tile grid positions).
3. Update entity interaction, triggers, chunk management, and other systems that currently assume tile-based positioning so they work with the new 3D positioning/movement code.
4. Investigate and fix poor UI rendering performance. Rendering the console alone tanks framerate despite the existing mesh optimizations, so there is likely more headroom to find in the vertex/text rendering path.
5. Create UI elements for displaying status indicators, e.g. network connection state and save-in-progress.
6. Fully test saving end-to-end on all supported platforms.
7. Remove the tile system from chunks in favor of meshes, with dynamic hitboxes per chunk loaded in from the chunk file data.
8. Create UI elements for network status: a connecting modal, an error state, and a connected flag. Retire the test HTTP request once these are in place.
9. Build the socket server and client implementation, including handlers for the different packet types.
10. Add a dedicated multiplayer entity type, clientplayer, alongside the existing npc and player types. Limit to 8 (defined constant) for now.
11. Send and receive clientplayer position over the network.
12. Create a UI menu for creating a server and joining a server. For now, join IPs are hard-coded (testing against a fixed IP of 10.0.0.94).
13. Create "handshake" packets. For now, just send the username, enforced to be under 10 characters long.
14. Server tracks all players' positions and broadcasts them to all connected clients.
15. Server sends disconnect packets for users who leave.
16. Server assigns each client a UUID; all clients know every other client's UUID (used to reference them across position updates, disconnect packets, etc).
17. Server notifies all clients (by UUID) when a user joins, leaves, or is disconnected, so clients can spawn or remove the corresponding clientplayer entity in the world.

Infrastructure / debt backlog

Found during a full-codebase inventory pass (2026-07-30, see STATUS.md for the full survey). These aren't new feature milestones so much as loose ends worth closing, roughly in order of how cheap/safe they are to fix:

1. Re-enable test/item (currently commented out in test/CMakeLists.txt) -- confirm it still passes and turn it back on.
2. Restore itemgive.c/h in src/duskrpg/item/CMakeLists.txt -- the textbox UI dependency it was waiting on (ui/textbox/) is already back.
3. Decide the fate of the vita target: scripts/build-vita.sh and docker/vita/ reference -DDUSK_TARGET_SYSTEM=vita, but no cmake/targets/vita.cmake exists, so the build is currently broken. Either implement it or remove the dangling scripts/Dockerfile.
4. Add per-PR CI build coverage for at least one non-Linux target (PSP, Knulli, GameCube, Wii currently only build on tag push, so regressions there are invisible until a release).
5. Tackle milestone 4 above (poor UI rendering performance) with a concrete lead: extend uiconsole.c's cached-mesh pattern (rebuild only on dirty) to the general widget framework (uiframe.c/uilabel.c/buttons/menus), which currently rebuilds and re-uploads geometry via spriteBatchBuffer/meshFlush every frame.
6. Revisit the GameCube/Wii networking static-IP workaround in networkdolphin.c -- it's standing in for an unresolved suspected memory-corruption bug in if_config()'s DHCP path.
7. Decide whether the PSP dialog-based network connect UI needs to come back -- it was removed entirely (not fixed) when the original dialog-tearing bug proved hard to resolve.
8. Backfill unit tests for the biggest untested surfaces: ui/ (whole widget framework), save/, script/ (JerryScript bindings), event/.

Principles

• Never trust the network implicitly. Neither side (server or client) should assume the other's packets are well-formed or benign -- validate all incoming packet data defensively, since either side may send garbage or malicious data. Use errorret_t / errorThrow() for these runtime checks, not assert macros -- asserts are debug-only and won't guard release builds against malformed or malicious packet data.