Roadmap for M.U.G.E.N

Hi all. My name is David and I'm one of the developers working on M.U.G.E.N. A lot of people have been wondering about the future of M.U.G.E.N itself and what features to expect in upcoming versions. Hopefully after reading this post, you'll have a better idea what we're trying to accomplish.

First, as we've stated before, our current priority is to fix the bugs in the 1.0RC series when it comes to content produced for the 2002 beta. We've been squashing bugs left and right and I think we're getting really close to start looking at new features. We have been reading the feature request section of the forum and I know it's a lot, but rest assured we're seriously considering what's being posted. There are a lot of good ideas that were proposed, but because of our limited time and manpower, we're forced to choose very carefully. I won't go over them one by one, but I do want to share some of the things we want to see in M.U.G.E.N.

1.0RC series (primarily bug fixes)
- Bug fixes.
- Limited number of added features. These will be limited to correcting issues with characters assuming 4:3 screens or specific resolutions.

1.0 Stable
- Stable release of 1.0 series. Only bug fixes planned until 1.1 series is ready.

1.1 series (gameplay enhancements)
- New cns features
- Character independent Tag option (will be blogging on this later)
- Additional support for full games. Nothing specific as of yet, but there will be more info as 1.1 gets closer.
- Other enhancements that will improve gameplay.

2.0
- More expressive scripting engine
- More customization over game objects
- Modern graphics engine

So what's 2.0 then? This is our exciting new project! It's hard to tell right now, but if you remember our FAQ from way back when, we mentioned major changes. This is it. Our plan is to address all the things that M.U.G.E.N can't do currently and implement functions that make things easier to add the kinds of things people have been asking for.

For instance, one of our other developers, R, wanted to add this:
"Many of you have requested changes and extensions to CNS, such as
additional state controllers and triggers, state handling for stages,
functions and flow control, or additional sprite and anim standards.
Many of these ideas have been around for quite some time, and yet we
may seem oddly resistant to implementing them. Let me explain our
reluctance to add some of these features.

CNS was designed from a very simple core through a gradual process of
accretion, and has reached a state that we feel is rather unwieldy and yet
quite restrictive. Given the limitations of CNS, we're amazed at what the
community has achieved with the engine in its current form. Although it would
be possible to retrofit any number of point fixes on top of CNS to patch its
functionality in response to specific requests, we want to look ahead to a less
straitjacketed, more general, and ultimately coder-friendlier solution. This
means a move away from CNS to something else. We don't yet know what that will
be, although we think we have some good ideas.

Now, we recognize that back-compatibility is important, so we plan to maintain
support for legacy characters written in CNS, hopefully without requiring
external converters or manual updates. However, the more complexity is added to
CNS, the more difficult and error-prone it will be to maintain such
compatibility. Therefore, major changes are less likely to be made in this area
until the redesign of the state engine."

This will be start of the 2.0 series.

Whew! That was a lot more than I expected! I hope everyone now has a better idea of what we're trying to do with M.U.G.E.N now and into the future.

- dfw