Roadmap

ZEngine Roadmap

This page tracks milestones, what has shipped, and what comes next. For detailed technical status see Engine Architecture, Rendering Domain, and the design documents.

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Milestone: Stable Core (1.0.0)

Status: In progress · GitHub milestone

Closes the rendering pipeline, wires the ECS to the renderer, adds the component reflection system, and stabilises the editor for daily use.

Key feature groups

Render pipeline completeness

Issue	Description	Assignee
#642	Wire ECS TransformComponent/MeshComponent into RenderScene	—
#643	Wire LightComponent into LightArrayUBO — data-driven lighting	—
#644	Frustum culling — FrustumCullSystem + CulledComponent	—

Component reflection and inspector

All assigned to @jnyfah. Dependencies flow left to right — #647 and #648 can start in parallel today.

#647 (GetComponentRaw) ──────────────────────────────┐
#648 (types) ──► #649 (registry) ──► #650 (register) ──► #651 (inspector loop)
                                                          #652 (Add Component — Phase 2)

Issue	Description	Depends on
#647	IComponentStorage::GetRaw + Scene::GetComponentRaw	—
#648	FieldType / FieldDescriptor / ComponentMeta types	—
#649	ComponentReflectionRegistry	#648
#650	Register all 8 built-in components	#648, #649
#651	Inspector generic loop — replaces per-component blocks	#647, #649, #650
#652	AddComponentRaw + "Add Component" button (Phase 2)	#651

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Milestone: First steps (0.4.0) — completed

GitHub milestone

Established the editor foundation, asset pipeline, and rendering plumbing needed for scene-authoring workflows.

Shipped in 0.4.x

Area	What shipped
ECS	Custom sparse-set ECS: generational entity handles, ComponentStorage<T>, WorldTick DAG scheduler, ActorManager, WorldCommands deferred mutations; 8 component headers; ActorTest.cpp; duplicate-EntityID guard; per-system staging buffers (PR #619, #620, #628)
Memory	3 GB arena allocator, sub-arena budgets, scratch arena pair, PaddedAtomic<T>, MemoryBudgetConfig; Array<T> move-only; HashMap/UnorderedHashMap rewrite (PR #615); import/asset arena collapsed to single level — ImportPipeline watermark 84 % → 62 %
VFS	Full VFS stack (tickets 1–6): VFSPath, mount table, VFSDiskBackend, VFSZipBackend, VFSScanner, VFSFileWatcher; .meta sidecars; AssetRegistry; VFSOpenFlags::Create + Truncate (PR #621)
Asset pipeline	GltfImporter (fastgltf), AssimpImporter, EnvironmentMapImporter; ImportCoordinator; cook to .zemesh + .zematerial; material texture handles bound at draw time (PR #634)
Rendering	Render graph redesign — typed RGResourceHandle indices, RGAccess-driven automatic barriers, per-frame RuntimeState, all render targets transient and owned by the graph (PR #641); deferred PBR pipeline — 3-RT G-buffer (AlbedoAO, NormalRoughness, MetallicEmissive), LightingPass with Cook-Torrance BRDF, depth-based position reconstruction; stable viewport resize via swap-and-reuse slot; global packed vertex/index buffers (256 MB each); SkyboxPass + GridPass
Editor UI	Dark theme; dockable layout system; content browser; asset importer panel; UIDispatcher replaced with MainThreadScheduler::Post; NSOpenPanel main-thread deadlock fixed (PR #645)
Engine	Main + render thread split; MainThreadScheduler (lock-free MPSC); FixedTimestepAccumulator; FrameRateCap
Platform	macOS Dock icon, Windows taskbar icon, Linux window icon; RecreationState machine (PR #623); OnClosed dangling-pointer fix
Stability	Zero vkDestroyDevice validation errors on shutdown; arena-allocated Vulkan teardown pattern; CrashHandler signal fix (PR #624)

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Future

Systems planned after 1.0.0 closes:

System	Status	Notes
Shadows	Planned	Cascaded shadow maps, spot/point shadows — design doc at shadows.md
Post-processing	Planned	Bloom, ACES tone mapping, SSAO, FXAA — design doc at post-processing.md
IBL / reflection	Planned	Irradiance probes, specular cubemaps; base PBR (Cook-Torrance) already ships in 0.4.x
Physics	Planned	Jolt integration; rigid body, character controller, raycasting
Animation	Planned	Skeletal animation, AnimationSampleSystem, GPU skinning
Scene serialization	Planned	ECS-based YAML + binary formats with upgrade paths
Scripting	Planned	C++ DLL hot-reload, Lua 5.4
Audio	Planned	miniaudio integration, spatial 3D audio
Networking	Planned	GGPO rollback, GNS transport, replication
LOD	Planned	Distance-based mesh switching
GPU culling (advanced)	Planned	Cluster-based deferred culling, draw call sorting — CPU frustum culling lands in 1.0.0
Lightmap baking	Planned	Offline lightmap generation
Texture compression	Planned	KTX2 / BCn / ASTC
UI system	Planned	In-game immediate-mode UI over retained tree
Text rendering	Planned	MSDF font atlas, UTF-8 layout, localization
Plugin SDK	Planned	C++ plugin system, Python host