diff --git a/ROADMAP.md b/ROADMAP.md index 0fa44f04..29de6c3e 100644 --- a/ROADMAP.md +++ b/ROADMAP.md @@ -40,7 +40,7 @@ travel and sandbox play. | Character and companions | Attributes, skills, condition, equipment, companion care, trust, levels, livestock, and vehicle travel | Player-selectable Explorer identities, richer appearance, training, and ability growth | | Earth travel | Walking, distinct road vehicles, responder vehicles, drone, personal aircraft, airport aircraft, boats, ships, and skydiving | More vehicle classes, facilities, damage presentation, and physical-device tuning | | Water | Shore visibility, mapped vessel identity, marinas, ports, playable boat and ship classes, shore/boat/underwater fishing | Wider port coverage, water traffic, maritime activities, and reviewed bathymetry | -| Space | Manual and assisted flight, selectable courses, celestial collision, planetary entry, accepted surfaces, landing, and return | More complete planetary activities, destinations, spacecraft, and visual review | +| Space | Manual and assisted flight, selectable courses, celestial collision, planetary entry, accepted surfaces, landing, and return | Optional long-distance Expeditions, more complete planetary activities, destinations, spacecraft, and visual review | | World construction | One World Editor containing persistent local and room Blocks | Terrain shaping, building materials, interiors, decoration, and creator publishing | | Community | Bounded rooms, presence, chat, activities, shared Blocks, persistent room vehicles, and public game leaderboards | Larger-room review, moderation depth, clubs, events, and shared settlements | | Access and performance | Keyboard, touch, mobile layouts, accessibility settings, bounded loading, and lifecycle cleanup | Broader phone, browser, assistive-technology, battery, and thermal review | @@ -198,6 +198,203 @@ adding city-specific exceptions. - Preserve manual control. Assistance remains optional, visible, local to the selected destination, and interruptible by the player. +## Interstellar Expeditions + +Interstellar Expeditions will make the journey between distant destinations a +game of its own without replacing the current space sandbox. Players will keep +three choices through the same universe and destination catalog: + +1. **Free flight:** enter a personal spacecraft, fly manually, orbit, land, + leave the craft, and explore with the existing Character, geology, building, + and planetary systems. +2. **Assisted travel:** select a destination and use the current optional, + interruptible travel assistance. +3. **Interstellar Expedition:** deliberately plan and provision a persistent + long-range ship, manage the voyage, and return to ordinary local exploration + on arrival. + +Mars, a discovered world, a player base, and an outpost remain the same places +regardless of how the player reaches them. Expedition work will extend the +existing body catalog, world addresses, Space Flight, Character, Backpack, +Journal, geology, World Editor, Blocks, rooms, and persistence. It will not +create Expedition-only copies of those systems. + +### Stage 1: research and system decisions + +- Produce one primary `INTERSTELLAR_EXPEDITION_SYSTEM.md` before broad + implementation. It will make decisions about propulsion, relativity, + strategic time, crew, closed life support, ship interiors, resources, + failure, multiplayer, persistence, performance, and the boundary with + ordinary Space. +- Base physical claims on authoritative scientific and engineering sources. + Distinguish catalog observations, established physics, modeled values, + speculative engineering, game-generated content, and fictional technology. +- Retain known physical distance while presenting simulated mission duration + and expected player time separately. One travel calculator will own route + feasibility, acceleration and deceleration, propellant, external elapsed + time, crew-experienced time when relativity matters, and play-time + compression. +- Use hierarchical world addresses and reference frames so nearby flight stays + precise while the same architecture can address planets, stars, nebulae, and + galaxies. Catalog objects take precedence; deterministic generated objects + fill appropriate gaps without being presented as observed fact. +- Separate Expedition chronology from contemporary Earth context. A voyage + representing centuries will not silently move the live Earth world into a + fictional future. + +This stage is complete when the design names one owner for every shared state, +resolves the scientific and gameplay decisions needed for implementation, and +defines schema migration and rollback. It will not remain an open list of +alternatives. + +### Stage 2: one complete journey foundation + +- Add one Expedition planner with a small set of understandable realism and + survival presets plus an advanced custom choice. The planner covers + destination, ship, propulsion, crew role coverage, resources, route stops, + risk, and a clear Ready, Marginal, or Insufficient assessment. +- Create data-driven ship and propulsion profiles whose mass, thrust, range, + crew, cargo, power, life support, maintenance, and interior requirements + produce meaningfully different journeys. Real, speculative, and fictional + drives retain honest classifications and explanations. +- Keep personal equipment in the Backpack, voyage supplies in ship cargo, and + outpost resources in settlement storage. Every transfer is explicit and + conservation-checked. +- Use one versioned Expedition record for the ship, route, current leg, + strategic time, crew, supplies, system condition, cargo, discoveries, major + events, and mission state. Stable ship identity includes its class, + configuration, upgrades, condition, crew association, and history. +- Add an interim mission allocation for initial provisioning without embedding + a temporary currency throughout the game. It must be replaceable by the + future shared World Explorer economy. + +The first implementation proves a complete representative journey: prepare, +board, depart, advance time, consume supplies, respond to a real ship problem, +record a discovery, arrive, leave the Expedition ship, and continue as the same +Explorer through the existing local Space and planetary systems. + +### Stage 3: the ship, crew, and voyage + +- Make each Expedition ship a bounded, high-quality, walkable place assembled + from validated class-specific layouts. Required rooms must exist, remain + reachable, fit the exterior, support collision, and perform real functions; + unused decorative labels do not count as systems. +- Connect bridge, engineering, life support, medical, cargo, fabrication, + science, crew, food production, cryogenic, and vehicle spaces only when the + selected ship requires them. Room and deck visibility, shared assets, + bounded lighting, and crew detail levels keep interiors playable in a + browser and on supported phones. +- Use the existing Explorer as a crew member. NPC crew have names, ages, + health, fatigue, experience, assignments, and overlapping technical roles. + They work, rest, repair, treat, and perform science in the visible ship with + purposeful bounded behavior. Routine schedules and maintenance are automatic + unless the player chooses deeper control. +- Track a focused set of consequential supplies: food, water and life support, + power, propulsion resources, medical supplies, maintenance material, + fabrication feedstock, and mission cargo. Forecast consumption, recycling + losses, production, uncertainty, and safety margin before departure. +- Give propulsion, power, life support, navigation, thermal control, medical, + fabrication, food production, sensors, and hull systems condition that can + degrade, warn, fail, and recover. Repairs use crew skill, time, spares, or + valid fabrication; temporary repairs restore limited capability. +- Advance months or centuries through an analytical strategic clock rather + than faster render frames. The player can run normal time, choose a faster + rate, or advance to the next event or milestone; local exploration pauses + long-travel compression. +- Generate quiet travel and bounded state-driven events as well as contextual + uncertainty. Every event changes actual crew, resources, route, or ship state, + and unresolved problems can form an understandable failure chain. A prepared + Expedition normally has backups, warnings, repair, diversion, and rescue + opportunities before it can be lost. +- Record departures, arrivals, repairs, losses, discoveries, route changes, + resupply, rescue, outposts, and outcomes in a Captain's Log presentation + backed by the existing Journal and progression authority. + +### Stage 4: stops, discoveries, and long-duration missions + +- Let a route include known planets, moons, small bodies, bases, outposts, and + stable game-generated destinations. Reachability comes from distance, ship, + propulsion, supplies, and valid stops rather than an arbitrary player level. +- Make resource recovery use the existing planetary flight, geology, mining, + rover, Backpack, and cargo paths. A player may land and gather, deploy a + capable rover, trade with a stocked location, salvage a valid object, or + receive a trusted transfer; no menu may create supplies from nothing. +- Let sensors progress an unknown object from detection to a better supported + classification. Generated discoveries retain a stable identity, designation, + seed, and truth label across save, reload, departure, and return. Known + catalog objects are never presented as player-created discoveries. +- Support cryogenic missions with reserve specialists who can be awakened when + needed. Treat human long-term suspension as speculative, with costs and + limitations rather than a cosmetic label. +- Support generation voyages with bounded population continuity, aging, + training, role succession, knowledge preservation, food, life support, + medical capability, and maintenance. This is not a politics, relationship, + or civilization simulator, and it will not store individual genetic data. +- Apply established Special Relativity to ships reaching meaningful fractions + of light speed, including acceleration, deceleration, external time, and + crew-experienced time. Explicitly fictional faster-than-light travel remains + available only under its honest game classification. + +### Stage 5: shared Expeditions and persistent outposts + +- Extend the current room and backend authority so one human with NPC crew or + multiple humans can share one ship, route, clock, crew, cargo, resource, and + system state. Clients do not independently award or consume shared supplies. +- Synchronize players walking through the same interior while leaving routine + NPC animation and effects local where they do not affect authority. Time + compression requires a clear host or consent decision and remains safe when + a player disconnects and rejoins. +- Allow a compatible player Expedition to answer a distress request only when + route and time make a rendezvous possible. Trusted transfers remove the exact + cargo from the assisting ship before adding it to the receiving ship, and + both Captain's Logs record the rescue. +- Let a suitable Expedition establish a bounded outpost at an existing + planetary destination using the existing World Editor and Blocks. Its crew, + habitat, power, food, water, life support, medical capacity, maintenance, + production, and storage determine what survives or becomes available later. +- Keep an outpost present for ordinary Free-Roam visits and future Expeditions. + It is a persistent resupply node, not a separate colony-management game or a + duplicate planetary world. + +### Completion and release gates + +Interstellar Expeditions are complete only when the following connected +journeys work from planning through persistence, not merely as menus or meters: + +- unchanged Free-Roam flight, assisted travel, landing, planetary exploration, + geology, building, takeoff, and return with no Expedition requirements; +- one complete Expedition with a functional walkable ship, active crew, + consequential resources and systems, a repair, a discovery, arrival, local + exploration, and continuation; +- a real multi-stop resupply using existing planetary or rover gameplay; +- cryogenic crew replacement, a multigenerational voyage, and numerically + validated relativistic travel; +- shared human crew, disconnect and reconnect, coordinated strategic time, and + a resource-conserving multiplayer rescue; +- one persistent outpost that advances within its bounded model and is the same + place in Expedition and Free-Roam play; +- a recoverable and an unrecoverable multi-stage failure with a causal report; +- a stable generated discovery that survives save, reload, departure, and + return; and +- a full active-journey save and restore with the same Explorer, ship layout, + crew, ages, supplies, systems, route, time, cargo, discoveries, log, and + outposts. + +A deterministic non-rendering simulation will exercise representative short, +interplanetary, nearby-star, cryogenic, generation, relativistic, fictional, +multi-stop, rescue, and outpost journeys across long simulated durations. It +will test conservation and deliberately reproduce failure chains rather than +only successful missions. Actual desktop and mobile gameplay review will still +verify planning, ship interiors, crew activity, cruise, emergencies, arrival, +local exploration, visual quality, audio, accessibility, lifecycle cleanup, +and the unchanged ordinary Space experience. + +The initial system stops at this complete loop. It does not add a technology +tree, politics, romance, factions, alien civilizations, diplomacy, banking, a +manufacturing empire, or a full city, colony, or interstellar-market simulator. +Galaxy-scale addressing does not claim that every destination is handcrafted +or reachable by every ship. + ## Creation and community - Extend the World Editor with terrain-safe voxel and material tools while