direction.md 3.0 KB
Minetest Direction Document
1. Long-term Roadmap
The long-term roadmaps, aims, and guiding philosophies are set out using the following documents:
- What is Minetest?
- celeron55's roadmap
- celeron55's comment in "A clear mission statement for Minetest is missing"
- Core developer to-do/wish lists
2. Medium-term Roadmap
These are the current medium-term goals for Minetest development, in no particular order.
These goals were created from the top points in a roadmap brainstorm. This should be reviewed approximately yearly, or when goals are achieved.
Pull requests that address one of these goals will be labelled as "Roadmap". PRs that are not on the roadmap will be closed unless they receive a concept approval within a week, issues can be used for preapproval. Bug fixes are exempt for this, and are always accepted and prioritised. See CONTRIBUTING.md for more info.
2.1 Rendering/Graphics improvements
The priority is fixing the issues, performance, and general correctness. Once that is done, fancier features can be worked on, such as water shaders, shadows, and improved lighting.
Examples include transparency sorting, particle performance, general view distance.
This includes work on maintaining our Irrlicht fork, and switching to alternative libraries to replace Irrlicht functionality as needed
2.2 Internal code refactoring
To ensure sustainable development, Minetest's code needs to be refactored and improved. This will remove code rot and allow for more efficient development.
2.3 UI Improvements
A formspec replacement is needed to make GUIs better and easier to create. This replacement could also be a replacement for HUDs, allowing for a unified API.
A new mainmenu is needed to improve user experience. First impressions matter, and the current main menu doesn't do a very good job at selling Minetest or explaining what it is. A new main menu should promote games to users, allowing Minetest Game to no longer be bundled by default.
The UI code is undergoing rapid changes, so it is especially important to make an issue for any large changes before spending lots of time.
2.4 Object and entity improvements
There are still a significant number of issues with objects. Collisions, performance, API convenience, and discrepancies between players and entities.