Technology Roadmap
Our platform is constantly improving and becoming more useful with the end goal of being the go-to tool for all types of multiplayer game!
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Customer-Driven Development
Our roadmap is shaped by carefully listening to feedback and suggestions from our users, mainly through conversations on our Discord server. It's also informed by our own in-house experience making games.
If you want to help shape the future of Planetary Processing as the go-to tool for making multiplayer games, then please join the conversation and share your thoughts, problems and ideas!
Keep reading below to see our roadmap as it is now and remember, if you think we're missing something important, let us know!
Increasing the speed, power, and compatibility of each of our plugins. So that developers can use whichever version of their engine suits them best, without sacrificing speed.
Improved & extended tutorials and downloadable source code for projects using Planetary Processing in each of our engines.
We are looking forward to bringing Planetary Processing to GameMaker engine with our next new plugin.
We'll be enabling subdividing of chunks to maximise efficiency and ensure that if a part of the world is highly busy then performance remains stable.
Our ping optimization system will look at the average geographic location of all the players in each chunk and then locate the chunk in the server which will minimise the median ping for players. By doing this, we ensure that the most players possible have an equivalent, lag-free experience while playing your game. This feature will be easily enabled and disabled and will only be available to games on our premium tier.
Our matchmaking system will help users who wish to create instanced multiplayer games using our dimensions system. By doing this automatically, we’ll be progressing our goal of making developing your game easier with Planetary Processing!
Expansion into greater player management and account features. As well as adding more HTTP endpoints for adjusting your game as a developer.
Various tools to help developers build procedurally generated worlds will be incorporated into our API. This will include traditional proc-gen tools like Perlin and Simplex noise, among others.
We intend to improve on our existing authentication system to provide alternatives for developers who wish to integrate with third party platforms like Steam, Xbox Live, Epic Games, and so on.
Global systems are scripts that run and impact the whole world. While they will only have a limited API as they are not associated with any particular chunk. This has many potential uses, such as globally managing entity spawning or a global chat system or even the weather!
We wish to provide an exceptional service for developers anywhere in the world. To do so, we need to expand our server resources globally.
The Switch will be our first officially supported console.
As a major expansion to Planetary Processing’s offering, we intend to provide an alternative development pathway to better compliment smaller games. Peer to peer systems rely less on the server for simulation and can better utilize the features of your chosen game engine. This expansion will take the form of variant plugins for all of our engines, alongside extensive backend systems and API additions.
The web app will be overhauled in conjunction with the addition of Peer to Peer to cater for the new development pathway. Simultaneously we will use this opportunity to make a series of changes to the live map and logs to improve readability and resource usage.
We will add a collection of Quality of Life features to the editor to make it more akin to a desktop IDE. In doing so we will overhaul the logs system and add quick-access tutorial and reference material to the panel.
Expand on the existing plugins to offer more abstractions and options for the various different design approaches possible with Planetary Processing. Add support for engine-specific features while maintaining versatility.
Iterate on our existing physics to bring it to parity with popular game engines to make it a viable alternative.
We plan to provide an SDK for web apps to use the Planetary Processing platform directly.
We plan to announce official support for Xbox & Playstation consoles.
Interfacing with popular engine features like physics and AI to make multiplayer integration seamless.
Provide a version of Planetary Processing's server-side software which can be self-hosted.
Revision of existing API with expanded features and improved usability based on user feedback.
Add an independent AI framework for use on our backend, further making our service engine agnostic.
and that's not it
other features and improvements
This list isn't comprehensive, and it omits a lot of smaller or less exciting features and improvements that we have planned but didn't include in this list. To stay up-to-date, check out the changelog blogs we regularly post on our blogs page!
