ES-DE/ROADMAP.md

EmulationStation Desktop Edition (ES-DE) - Feature roadmap

ES-DE is developed using an agile methodology so which features to include per release is reviewed and adjusted continuously. As such this document is basically a list of the main features that are planned to be added eventually.

A more detailed breakdown can be found on the Kanban board, and for previous releases the Changelog contains all relevant details.

General functionality

• RetroAchievements.org integration
• "Time played" counter per game, similar to how it works in Steam
• Bulk metadata editor
• Mouse/touch screen support
• Background music
• Controller button mappings from inside ES-DE (similar to pad2key in Batocera)
• Localization/multi-language support
• Auto-import tools for Steam, Lutris etc.

User interface

• Menu reorganization, possibly adding basic/advanced modes
• Animated menu elements like switches and tick boxes
• Simple file browsing component

Theme engine

• Composite element support for enabling advanced and finely controlled layouts
• Element animation support (storyboards)
• Scrollbar component for the system and gamelist views
• Removal of legacy theme support

Scraper

• Checksum support for the scraper for exact searches and for determining when to overwrite files
• Support for additional scraper services

Infrastructure

• New texture/cache manager with improved memory management and performance
• Better and more accurate RAM and VRAM usage statistics
• Vulkan renderer for all supported operating systems (via MoltenVK on macOS)
• Proper audio mixer
• Improved multi-threading
• Reduced amount of gamelist reloading to retain cached textures and improve overall performance
• Replace the built-in Unicode functions and lookup tables with those of the ICU library
• Text kerning support using the HarfBuzz library
• Replacement for the abandoned FreeImage library