OctopusKit Roadmap

If you’d like to help with the development of the OK project, these are some of the areas that need to be implemented.

1. Currently Working On
2. Major Missing Features
3. To Do
4. To Decide

Currently Working On

• Swift Logging API

Major Missing Features

More-or-less in order of priority/necessity:

• Components for gamepad/joystick and Siri Remote input.
• Asset/resource loading system.
• Saving and loading game/scene/entity/component graphs via Codable.
• Networking components.
• SceneKit support.
• Declarative syntax like SwiftUI for describing scenes and entities. 🤫
• Custom Scene Editor & Live Previews?

To Do

• More Tests. Too lazy.
• Decide upon a coding style and conventions.
• More tutorials for common tasks.
• Clarify super chaining where applicable – when an overridden method in a subclass needs to call the superclass method for the functionality to work correctly – and enforce it when it becomes possible through language support in a future version of Swift, similar to NS_REQUIRES_SUPER in Objective-C.
• Eliminate the possibility of a SKNode.physicsBody being added to a scene more than once.
• Internationalization/Localization
• Implement configurable Xcode templates (single files with multiple variations based on options during file creation, e.g. single-state scenes vs. multi-state scenes.)
• Add Codable support for components and their init?(coder aDecoder: NSCoder) where applicable.
• GitHub Wiki?

Performance Optimizations

• Replace Array with ContiguousArray where applicable.

Outstanding Bugs & Known Issues

• Nodes added via an SKReferenceNode that is loaded from a scene created in the Xcode Scene Editor, start with their isPaused set to true until Xcode pauses and resumes the program execution.

• UITouch.location(in:) and UITouch.previousLocation(in:) are sometimes not updated for many frames, causing a node to “jump” many pixels after 10 or so frames. Same issue with preciseLocation(in:) and precisePreviousLocation(in:).

• UITouch.location(in:) and UITouch.preciseLocation(in:) for a touch “wobbles” when a 2nd touch moves near it, even if the tracked touch is stationary. Seems to be a problem since iOS 11.3 on all devices, in all apps, including system apps like Photos. RADAR: 39997859.

To Decide

• Use variadic parameters (...) instead of arrays in certain places, like GKEntity.addComponent(_:)?
• Write standalone documentation for every API unit? (Currently, source comments are the primary API documentation.)
• Write documentation and tutorials for absolute beginners? i.e. people who have no experience with Xcode or Swift?
• Rework pausing/subscene system?

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OctopusKit © 2021 Invading Octopus • Apache License 2.0