Galactica/TODO.md

## Specific Jobs
 - UI: text arranger
 - Start documenting
 - Check for handle leaks
 - Don't allocate each frame
 - Sound system
 - Ship death debris
 - Sprite reels
   - random start frame
   - ship leaks
 - Passive engine glow
 - Ship death damage and force events
 - Gun fire effect
 - Sprite color variation
 - Multi-particle effects
 - Better loading
   - incremental?
   - Higher texture limit (16 x 8096 x 8096 isn't enough)
   - GPU limits? (texture size, texture number, particle/sprite limits)
 - Particles when a ship is damaged (events)
 - Sticky radar
 - Arbitrary size resource names


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## Game & Story
 - How to keep player in system bounds, what to do if they fly far away
   - Max chase distance, physics-enforced area?
   - (Soft limits, you shouldn't go too far unless you decide to.)
   - Enforce: silently teleport to the other end
 - How to handle death -- save scum should not be the norm (hollow knight?)
 - Jumping between systems -- how?
 - Locks and keys -> variation?
 - Active abilities
 - Hard to get outfits you've lost (hollow knight's charms do this very well)
 - Missions: hunt scary targets
 - The world exists outside of the system you're in
   - (large-scale dynamics)
 - How does information travel?
 - Communication timer: destroy a ship fast, nobody needs to know
 - Do we want to pay crew?
 - How should ship capturing work?
 - Enemy motivations
 - Where does money come from?
 - Changing map paths? How?



## Features
 - Music (user-configurable)
 - Sound effects
 - Debris (ship death, destructible, physics)
 - Orbiting debris (asteroids)
 - Collectibles (flotsam)
 - UI
   - loading screen, menus
   - Indicators (planet names, enemy ship stats)
 - Landable planets
 - Back arrow: reverse thruster or reverse ship
 - Multiplayer? (how does that fit into gameplay?)
 - On-screen text
 - Controller input & key bindings
 - Save games
 - Date system -> planet position
 - AI fleets
 - More ship behaviors
 - Jump between systems
 - Government color, ship tint
 - Different kinds of ship behaviors:
   - who to target
   - how to target them
   - where to go
   - etc, extra flags
 - Advanced particle physics (must move to cpu. Maybe both?)
 - Background simulation (two modes: physics-what's visible, data-everything else)


## Faction interaction
 - Targeting overrides hitscan rules (only for player)
 - Static and dynamic faction relationships (change with player actions/game events?)
 - Dynamic relationships only for player? Other governments may be hard-coded
 - Opinion towards player -> how to handle well?
 - Actions against one faction affect another


## Internal
 - Logging/warning system
 - Only compute timings when necessary
 - Elegantly handle lost focus
 - Pause game
 - Clear all `// TODO:` comments littered in the source
 - CLI options (debug, save location, content location, check content)
 - Config file and compile options, remove all those consts.
 - Better error when run outside of directory
 - Documentation site & front page
 - Random animation delay/fps?
 - Better WGSL preprocessor

## Content
 - Angled engines
 - Angled guns
 - Turn engine flares
 - Reverse engine & flares
 - Better ship colliders (need a tool or an algorithm)
 - Turrets
 - Weapons with ammunition
 - Enable/disable weapons
 - Cargo space
 - Display name != internal key
 - Conversations
 - Trade
 - Missions
 - Procedural suns
 - Heat and energy
 - Non-removable outfits
 - Space-converting outfits
 - Damage struct and debuffs

## Camera
 - Shake/wobble on heavy hits?
 - Camera effects on low health?
 - (or are ship particles better?)
 - Lookahead -> position or direction?
 - Damping?
 - Important objects affect camera

## Visuals
 - Dynamic lighting (planets & ships)
 - Motion blur
 - Zoom parallax (?)
 - Background haze
 - Nova dust parallax
 - Engine flare ease in/out
 - Lens flare
 - Clustered starfield
 - Redesign UI

## Write and Document
 - Parallax
 - Starfield & tiling
 - How the game is drawn
   - transforming game coordinates to screen
   - how angles work
 - Computation flow
   - Physics pipeline
   - Outfit pipeline
   - Collision detection
   - Ship AI
   - Handles
 - Content specification and pipeline
 - How packer and optimizations work, and why
 - How big should sprite resolutions be? How about frame rate?
 - Naming: atlas, sprite, image, frame, texture
 - Outfits may not change unless you've landed. They might not change ever for CC ships!


## Ideas
 - Improvements over ES
   - Better visuals
   - More interesting combat
   - More interesting missions
   - Big fleets shouldn't be broken (should the player even have a fleet?)
   - ES Enemies don't have a real motivation.
   - Death matters - save-scumming shouldn't be normal
   - More interesting trading?
 - Death penalty
   - Find your wreckage when you die (dark souls/HK)
   - Lose some outfits, lose ship? Real risk for going out! (HK does this well)
 - Damage to ship subsystems
 - Soft and highly armored ship points
 - Repair your own ship