transcience/docs/ROADMAP.md

Status and roadmap

Read this first when picking up work. It maps every feature in the design brief to its current state and the files that implement it, so you can find the relevant code without re-reading the whole project.

Art and audio source packs, and their licence status, are recorded in ASSETS.md — the packs themselves are not in git.

Design decisions that are already settled — and the reasoning behind them — live in DECISIONS.md. Check there before asking the user something that may already have an answer.

Legend: done · partial (works, with a stated gap) · todo (not started)

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Stage 1 — World and exploration · done

Feature	State	Where
Tile grid: movement / bullet / sight blocking	done	src/sim/map_grid.gd
Dungeon generation from (seed, depth)	done	src/sim/map_gen.gd
Hand-authored boss arenas and hub	done	src/content/rooms.gd
Walls, pillars, pits, barricades	done	MapGrid.Kind + the three BLOCKS_* tables
Enemies placed per room at creation	done	Instance._populate()
Scrolling camera	done	src/view/game_scene.gd
Hard fog of war	done	WorldView._draw_terrain / _visible
Per-peer map streaming (anti map-hack)	done	ServerRuntime._stream_map
Aggro: range and line of sight	done	SimWorld._aggro_target
Cursor-to-world aiming under a scrolling camera	done	ClientRuntime.screen_to_world
Boss confined to its room	done	SimWorld._step_boss clamps to SimBoss.room. A no-op while bosses are stationary — established now so Stage 5's movement cannot quietly break it.
Actor interest management	done	NetCodec.encode_snapshot(world, countdown, for_peer); per-peer encode in ServerRuntime. Bullet spawns filtered separately, see below.

The invariants that matter most here

Maps are streamed per peer, and the generation seed is never sent. See NETCODE.md. MAP_STREAM_RADIUS must stay wider than FOG_VIEW_RADIUS, or the client predicts movement against terrain it does not have.

Three radii, deliberately different, and each has a floor it must respect:

Radius	Value	Must exceed	Why
FOG_VIEW_RADIUS	460	—	What the player can see.
ACTOR_INTEREST_RADIUS	800	fog radius	Enemies beyond it are never sent. Above the fog radius so nothing pops in at the edge of sight.
MAP_STREAM_RADIUS	900	fog radius	Client predicts movement and simulates bullets against terrain it cannot see.
BULLET_INTEREST_RADIUS	2200	longest bullet travel + fog radius	A bullet is announced once at spawn. Withhold one that later flies into view and it becomes invisible damage. test_interest.gd computes the floor from real content, so a faster bullet fails a test instead.

Fog is a rendering rule and defends nothing on its own — a modified client draws whatever it holds. The defence is what the server declines to send.

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Art and audio · first pass done

Placeholders are gone: terrain, actors and bullets are sprites, and four sounds play off server events. Enough to prove the pipeline, not a finished look.

Feature	State	Where
Atlas/sound table in one place	done	src/view/art.gd
Terrain, actors, boss from the 0x72 atlas	done	WorldView._draw_tile / _draw_sprite
Animated bullet sprites, one MultiMesh per kind	done	src/view/bullet_renderer.gd
SFX pool driven by server events	done	src/view/sfx.gd
Rects validated without a display	done	tests/unit/test_art.gd
Impact/death VFX animation	todo	Art.IMPACT is loaded and validated but nothing plays it yet
Directional sprites, hit flashes, screen shake	todo
Audio buses and a volume setting	todo	Everything plays on Master at hardcoded dB
In-game credits screen	todo	Not cosmetic: the SFX are CC BY 4.0 and attribution is a licence requirement. CREDITS.md is not reachable by a player.
Replace the two non-redistributable packs	todo	Bullet and FX art is local-only and non-commercial. CC0 replacements would let them into the repo and unblock a commercial release. See ASSETS.md.

Stage 2 — Characters, persistence, levels · todo, next

Depends on nothing in Stage 1 except a place to stand. Blocked only on the identity layer, which is decided but unbuilt.

Feature	Notes
Identity abstraction	Shaped like Steamworks so it swaps out cleanly: opaque ticket from client → server validates → stable 64-bit account id (a SteamID64 stand-in). Local dev provider persists a generated id in user://. See DECISIONS.md.
Character store	Server-side, keyed by account id. Needs a schema and a file format; nothing persistent exists in the project today.
Up to 5 characters, random colour each	Colour is a placeholder for a later cosmetic system.
Last-played character auto-selected on join
Permadeath → mark inactive, never delete	Archival/troubleshooting. Confirm whether the 5-character cap counts only active characters.
Death flow: pick another character or create one	Replaces today's "return to hub" button, which currently just revives you.
Levels 1–15, +10 max HP per level	Confirm whether level 1 is 100 HP (→ 240 at cap) or 110.
XP from kills, bosses worth much more	First full dungeon should give slightly more than one level.

Current behaviour to replace: SimPlayer has no identity beyond a peer id; ServerRuntime.peer_names is client-supplied and trusted for display only.

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Stage 3 — Upgrades · todo

Feature	Notes
Lobby NPC, 3 random choices per level gained	Confirm whether unclaimed level-ups queue.
Every upgrade also grants +5% damage, additive	Displayed on the choice alongside its specific effects.
Upgrade list	split shot, glass cannon, spread, sniper, doubleshot (rarer), poison (rare), eraser (legendary)
Rarity weights	Unspecified. Needs numbers.
Damage stacking formula	Unspecified. Sniper is explicitly multiplicative; the rest read as additive. Order needs pinning down before any of it is built.
"Chosen upgrades" screen

Damage is currently the constant SimConfig.PLAYER_BULLET_DAMAGE; upgrades turn it into a per-player computed stat, so SimWorld._fire_player_shot grows a stats block. Several upgrades (split, spread, doubleshot) change how many bullets spawn per shot, so they belong in the same place.

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Stage 4 — Inventory and loot · todo

Feature	Notes
Small always-on-screen inventory	Slot count unspecified.
Health potions: rare from trash, guaranteed from bosses
World-shared loot	Player-instanced loot planned later.
A unique, useless food item from bosses	Exists specifically to test player-instanced loot. Confirm whether it should be instanced now or just marked for it.
Dropping items so others can pick them up

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Stage 5 — Boss features and new bosses · todo

Feature	State
Stationary phases	done — every current phase
Roaming / chasing within the boss room	todo; needs SimBoss.room clamping (see Stage 1 partial)
Phases that move to preset locations	todo
Attacks spawned at a distance with a telegraph indicator	todo — new event type plus a renderer, and it must survive fog
More bosses	partial — Rooms.choir_vault() is authored but has no BossDef yet

The boss format itself is proven: tests/unit/test_boss.gd builds a boss from scratch and asserts the simulation needs no changes to run it. Movement will be the first thing that format has not covered, so expect BossPhase to gain a movement field rather than SimWorld gaining a branch.

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Deliberate omissions

Not oversights — each was considered and rejected for now, with the reasoning in NETCODE.md or DECISIONS.md:

• Lag compensation. Rewinding to a shooter's view means a player who dodged still gets hit; wrong trade for this genre.
• Snapshot delta compression. Fine at current actor counts.
• DTLS / encryption. ENetMultiplayerPeer supports it. Required before any public server, not before then.
• Pattern-level bullet replication. A real bandwidth win that couples the client to emitter behaviour.
• MultiplayerSynchronizer / MultiplayerSpawner. Right tools, wrong shape for a bullet hell — see ARCHITECTURE.md.

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Open questions for the user

Genuinely unspecified; do not guess at these, they change the design:

1. Damage stacking order — additive pool then multiplicative, or something else?
2. Rarity weights for the four upgrade tiers.
3. Split shot geometry: ±22.5° from the original heading, or 45° to each side?
4. Poison: do applications stack, or refresh a single DoT?
5. Eraser: does it delete enemy bullets it passes through?
6. Inventory slot count.
7. Do unclaimed level-ups queue at the NPC?
8. Does the 5-character cap count only active characters?
9. Glass cannon's −50% health: of base HP, or of levelled max HP?
10. What advances dungeon depth? --depth is a dev flag; nothing raises it in play.