ES-DE/ROADMAP.md

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.

v1.0

• New gamelist sorting and media handling logic
• Overhaul of the menu system
• Scraping of additional image types as well as videos
• OpenGL shader support for blurred backgrounds, scanline rendering etc.
• Navigation sound support
• A comprehensive theme set bundled with the application
• Ports for Windows, macOS and BSD Unix
• Preconfigured systems configuration files for all supported operating systems
• A detailed user guide

v1.1

• 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)

v1.2

• 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

v2.0 (in progress)

• 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 the performance of the GLSL shader post-processing

v2.1

• 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

v2.2

• Removal of legacy theme support
• Background music
• Proper audio mixer
• 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

v2.3

• Vulkan renderer for all supported operating systems
• Use of MoltenVK to get Metal support on macOS
• Localization/multi-language support
• Bulk metadata editor
• Scrollbar component for the gamelist view which can be used by themes
• Simple file browsing component
• Web proxy support for the scraper
• Improve multi-threading

v2.4

• 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