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Scope and roadmap

What is released, what remains release-gated, and what tess will not become. The support policy governs stability; architecture documents describe the current checkout, the completion record preserves the historical v0.5-v0.12 sequence, and the release process owns the path to 1.0.

Released in v1.0.0

v1.0.0 provides the following tested machinery. The Concepts pages document this released checkout: 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. OperationBatch 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. Stable maintenance tasks, budgets, results, handles, structural customization, immediate execution, and an external fixed-slot chunk adapter support dense and sparse residency without integrating handles into storage. FIFO, queued-coalescing, dirty-bit, and virtual scheduling remain experimental. 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. Two movement-commit tiers resolve contention between agents whose routes were planned independently: joint movement admits a tick's moves together so agents never stack, with a caller-selected swap policy deciding whether a mutually blocked pair may exchange tiles, and the opt-in PIBT tier (priority inheritance with backtracking) additionally lets a blocked agent yield off its route, which resolves a head-on that the default swap-forbidding policy leaves blocked. 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.

The final breaking 0.x release added explicit content-version notification, retained and queue-produced route overlays, the 1.0 migration spellings documented in the upgrade guide, and calibrated budgeted-progress and maintenance evidence. The budgeted-progress record preserves its staged design and acceptance evidence.

The 1.0 release

The v0.13-to-v1.0 execution plan records the completed prototype dispositions and the release checks. The RC.1 and 1.0.0 compatibility snapshots protect the stable surface. The 1.x compatibility promise is defined in the support policy.

The maintained release process owns publication checks, including the one-time v1.0.0 observation decision and exact-commit evidence.

Future and deferred extensions

The foundations named below may be released or landed on main, but the extensions themselves do not exist as supported APIs. Do not build consumer code that assumes they do.

  • Persistent maintenance (scheduler TDD, maintenance addendum) — fixed cadences, dirty/manual/event triggers, exact event streams, and deterministic background continuation are released. Stable maintenance handles, immediate execution, structural customization, and an external dense-and-sparse chunk adapter are released in v0.13.0. FIFO, queued-coalescing, dirty-bit, and the virtual scheduler remain experimental; wider derived-system adapters and storage-owned handles remain future work.
  • Further spatial query acceleration (block TDD, layout addendum) — resolved block-lazy pipelines and exact box/radius/chunk spans are released. 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 are released. Today's supported answer for congestion-aware routing: write congestion from your simulation into a cost field and route through a weighted movement class -- the measured recipe, its policies, and a browser laboratory are in the congestion pricing guide.
  • Additional GPU algorithms (TDD) — the descriptor/concept layer and optional stable-C-API WebGPU transport are released. Consumers still provide algorithm pipelines and bindings, and the CPU stays authoritative.
  • Continuous crowd steering (project design) — local reservation and congestion arbitration are released, 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 are released. 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 are released 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.