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Scope and roadmap

What is shipped, what remains planned, and what tess will not become. The support policy governs stability; the archived TDD documents record design rationale, while the maintained completion plan owns sequencing and status.

Shipped

Every concept page under Concepts documents shipped, tested machinery: compile-time shapes and field schemas, dense and sparse residency, queued operations with result channels, the block kernel layer, topology and the reachability precheck, A* with movement classes, weighted batches, distance-field products and caches, the schedule loop, the EnTT, Flecs, and custom-ECS adapters, DeltaFrame render bridging, the production worker-pool phase executor, the GPU descriptor interface and optional WebGPU transport, and compile-gated diagnostics. Resolved regular and provider-composed transitions drive exact paths, fields, topology, caches, agents, and movement commit across orthogonal, clearance-preserving diagonal, and axial-hex worlds. FrameOps also carries typed intent batches and their version/invalidation policy; cooperative tickets resume budgeted work across ticks; and exact event streams drive coalesced OnEvent schedule cadences. Block-resolved lazy pipelines fuse adapters into explicit terminals, while exact box, Euclidean-radius, and chunk-local span queries emit allocation-free x-runs. Experimental maintenance backends are available for evaluation but are not integrated into storage because the coalescing prototype failed its sparse-overhead promotion gate. Region graphs also reconstruct shortest coarse region/portal routes and chunk corridors. Dense weighted multi-goal products are versioned, byte-budgeted, provider-aware, and reusable across runtime calls through an opt-in policy. Caller-keyed area indexes derive stable area summaries and adjacency from region graphs. Deterministic tactical assignment and local move coordination provide capacity-aware claims, caller-ranked destination reservations, and coordinate congestion summaries without owning game semantics or steering. Versioned world archives persist caller-selected authoritative scalar fields, stable chunk metadata, and compatibility identities in canonical little-endian form. Exact loads preflight corruption and compatibility, surface schema changes as explicit migration requirements, and invalidate derived products. Optional Dear ImGui helpers inspect dense and sparse world state and return caller-applied boolean field intents without introducing a core UI dependency or direct editor mutation.

Planned extensions

The foundations named below may exist, but the extensions themselves are not shipped. Do not build consumer code that assumes these APIs exist until the item moves to Shipped.

  • Persistent maintenance (scheduler TDD, maintenance addendum) — fixed cadences, dirty/manual/event triggers, exact event streams, and deterministic background continuation shipped. Experimental immediate, FIFO, and coalescing backends also shipped for evaluation, but coalescing maintenance handles are not integrated into storage.
  • Further spatial query acceleration (block TDD, layout addendum) — resolved block-lazy pipelines and exact box/radius/chunk spans shipped. Predicate bitsets, summaries, halos, and alternate layout experiments did not meet or have not yet been evaluated against their separate promotion gates.
  • Flow, congestion, and influence fields (TDD) — only distance fields, weighted persistent products, nearest-target queries, and coarse chunk corridors shipped. Today's fallback for congestion-aware routing: write congestion from your simulation into a cost field and route through a weighted movement class.
  • Additional GPU algorithms (TDD) — the descriptor/concept layer and optional stable-C-API WebGPU transport shipped. Consumers still provide algorithm pipelines and bindings, and the CPU stays authoritative.
  • Continuous crowd steering (project design) — local reservation and congestion arbitration shipped, but tess does not perform velocity-obstacle steering, formation control, or globally optimal multi-agent pathfinding.
  • Sparse backing-store persistence and full editor integration (project design) — dense and resident-set world archives and bounded optional ImGui substrate tools shipped. Durable non-resident chunk storage, picking, undo, general reflection, and game-specific meaning remain application-owned.
  • External grid benchmark data and the scenario oracle (TDD) — a harness-only design for community grid maps and scenario optima as opt-in fixtures and calibrated benchmarks. Strict parsers, inline fixtures, independent reference search, oracle bounds, and opt-in skip/strict behavior shipped network-free. External acquisition remains gated on documented content rights.

Out of scope

tess is not a renderer, physics engine, navigation-mesh generator, or drop-in ECS, and does not intend to become one. It supplies the spatial substrate; the application owns meaning, entities, and presentation.