EmulationStation Desktop Edition (ES-DE) - Release roadmap

This roadmap is under constant review so expect it to change from time to time.

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

Mix image generation based on screenshots, 3D boxes and marquee files (as in Skyscraper)
Ability to display game media in full screen from the gamelist view
Proper game launching screen
New FFmpeg-based video player
Better method to find installed emulators and cores
Move to the SDL2 GameController API
Different button graphics and names applied depending on controller type (Xbox, PlayStation or SNES style)

Support for pre-defined alternative emulators and cores (configured in es_systems.xml)
Badges highlighting things like favorite games, completed games etc. (will require theme support)
Virtual (on-screen) keyboard
Support for the Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspberry Pi OS)
Improve fullscreen support and make game launching more seamless, remove the temporary fullscreen hacks
Add GLM library dependency for matrix and vector operations, decommission the built-in functions
AppImage and AUR releases on Linux

New theme engine with generalized views (only System and Gamelist) and theme variants support
Multiple new components (carousel support for the Gamelist view, grid component etc.)
Support for Tate mode, i.e. vertical screen orientation for arcade cabinets and similar
Lottie animation (vector graphics) and GIF animation support
OpenGL ES 3.0 renderer for use on the Raspberry Pi
Replace the OpenGL fixed function pipeline renderer with a shader-based renderer
Replace NanoSVG with a more capable SVG rendering library
Improve text and font functions, e.g. dynamic texture allocation and faster and cleaner text wrapping
Improve GLSL shader post-processing performance

Theme downloader
Theme engine composite element support for enabling advanced and finely controlled layouts
Theme engine element animation support (storyboards)
New texture/cache manager with improved memory management and performance
Better and more accurate RAM and VRAM usage statistics
Scraping of game manuals and maps plus a viewer for these (with PDF and raster image support)
Support for additional scraper services
Checksum support for the scraper for exact searches and for determining when to overwrite files
RetroAchievements.org integration

Removal of legacy theme support
Background music
Proper audio mixer
Controller button mappings from inside ES-DE (similar to pad2key in Batocera)
Reorganize the menus, possibly adding basic/advanced modes
Reduced amount of gamelist reloading to retain cached textures and improve overall performance
Add "time played" counter per game, similar to how it works in Steam
Replace the built-in Unicode functions and lookup tables with those of the ICU library
Add text kerning support using the HarfBuzz library

Mouse/touch screen support
Animated menu elements like switches and tick boxes
Migration tools for importing game metadata and media from other frontend applications
Audit tools to clean up orphaned gamelist entries, media files etc.
Auto-import tools for Steam, Lutris etc.
Replace the abandoned FreeImage library