Roadmap
Preface
Throughout the years, there have been but a few airship mods and similar for Minecraft. While this type of mod has the potential for huge amounts of fun, prior iterations have been plagued with issues, including but not limited to
- No building on ships
- No standing on ships
- No physics
- Glitchiness
- No updates
- Overly simple or complicated
- Lack of documentation
While it is an ambitious goal to accomplish all of the above and more, Valkyrien Warfare seeks to do so. Without further ado, here is the roadmap for the Valkyrien Warfare project.
Terminology
(n.) = noun
(v.) = verb
(a.) = adjective
(t.) = technical
(nt.) = technical noun
Ship (n.) -- an object managed by the mod; a collection of blocks that has physics
Synonyms -- Airship, Physics Object (t.)
Version 1.0 [2019]
Things that will be accomplished with the release of version 1.0-beta1.
Renaming to "Valkyrien Skies"
When Valkyrien Warfare first released, it had cannons, permissions, and other factions-esque features. These have since been removed, and the name "Valkyrien Warfare" does not accurately reflect the project's values any longer.
Modularization
In the past, all of the mod's features have been lumped together into one big mod. This makes it very difficult to satisfy everybody. A lot of people are interested Valkyrien Warfare simply because it has potential to be a strictly superior alternative to other airship mods, but have no interest in the complex control systems. Some others come for the original allure of the "warfare" component of the mod, wanting servers. Still others love the new, complicated control system and want to use it.
Since there are so many use cases for flying ships, it is planned to make a "Valkyrien Skies Core" mod which should provide an API that will allow extension mods to add features including but not limited to...
- Cannons and other weapons
- Realistic physics
- Different control systems
- Factions
"Stable-ish" API
The Valkyrien Warfare API has changed a lot over the years, breaking some mod creator's hard work integrating with our mod. With the release of 1.0-beta1, our API should be stable enough that mod creators should not be worried about any custom-coded integrations being significantly broken by updates to the mod.
Crafting Recipes
Crafting recipes for items should be introduced with version 1.0. An RFC has not yet been created, however.
Features
[2020] Boats, submarines, and water physics
A feature should be added such that airships can be made to float inside of water, and optionally dive. This is a very broad feature, and will require a great deal of implementation details to be decided, including, but not limited to, preventing water from entering ships or allowing water to enter through holes. See RFC:Boats.
[2020] Transition to a standard physics library
The project currently uses a custom physics engine. Transitioning to using Bullet or similar is planned.
Adoption Preventers [2019-?]
The following items have been preventing the mod from taking off and becoming the dominant Minecraft airship mod. We intend to rectify them.
Lack of Documentation [2019-?]
Currently, the mod's documentation is limited. Fragmentation of control systems and constant feature changes with little or no explanation has made getting started very difficult. This is particularly exemplified by the complexity of setting up even the most basic ship. The Meta-Documentation section describes plans for documentation.
Stability Issues [2019-20]
The mod being plagued with stability issues. Looking through the GitHub issues, there are a lot of errors, glitches, and things otherwise not working.
Weird Crashes [2019-20]
Valkyrien Warfare as a mod experiences a lot of crashes. Currently, there is a lot of code being refactored up to modern standards. Hopefully, this should help with stability issues. Furthermore, we are investigating the possibility of various integration and unit tests for the mod which will help us catch bugs during development.
Loss of Ships [2019]
Currently, when there's a glitch that might cause a ship to disappear or otherwise become inaccessible to the player, the player is left with the unfortunate truth that their hard work is inaccessible. A couple things might be implemented to help fix this.
| Item | Target | Difficulty | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ship Backup System | 2019-20 | Moderate | A rudimentary system which preserves ship history and allows admins to restore the last backed up state of a named ship into the world. |
| Ship Teleport Command | 2019 | Easy | A command to teleport a ship to a player and vice-versa. |
| 'ShipProtect' | ? | Moderate | An extension or similar to Sponge Plugin 'Prism' to allow admins granular control over ship history. |
Difficulty of Community Input
So far, like most mods, it has been difficult for the community to communicate what is most wanted. Our feature requests sometimes come in the form of Discord messages, GitHub issues, and other hard-to-vote on platforms. Furthermore, it is often vague and people rarely understand what is most likely to be considered or not.
Therefore, detailed information on how to provide input and a comprehensive but simple process for feature suggestions and bug reports should be put into place. See the "Community Input" document for more detail.
Accessibility [2019-?]
Make the mod more accessible to people who speak different languages, or those with disabilities.
Internationalization [2019-20]
Make the mod fully internationalizable, for those that speak different languages. Include translated documentation.
Subtitles [?]
Implement relevant subtitles into the game for the hearing-impaired or those playing without volume.