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!
Allow developers to grant access to other developers and allow collaboration when working on a game. The creator of the game will remain the owner and will be the only person who can add or remove users from the game. This feature will only be available to games on our premium tier.
This feature will introduce global key-value store for setting and retrieving data that can be accessed anywhere in the world via a separate API.
We'll also be giving all chunks a data field which allows custom world information to be stored on a per-chunk basis outside of being stored in a particular entity.
And finally, this will introduce a private_data field for all player entities which is only synchronised down to the client of the associated player, not others (useful for inventory data and other private information that other players don't need to know).
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!
Our HTTP API will enable users to control their game, examine its state or even influence the game world via calling HTTP endpoints. More details can be found in our docs, where we've already documented what this API will look like when finished. This feature will only be available for games on our premium tier.
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.
Integrate a physics engine into the backend Lua API to help streamline development of games involving complex physics and collisions.
Our matchmaking system will help users who wish to create instanced multiplayer games using our dimensions system. By doing this automatically, we find yet more ways to make Planetary Processing the best place to build your multiplayer game!
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 groundbreaking ping optimisation 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.
Provide a version of Planetary Processing's server-side software which can be self-hosted.
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!
