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