InstanceBrick--nightcap/docs/ROADMAP.md

Nightcap roadmap

What Nightcap is working toward, in priority order. Items move to Shipped when they land on main. Open an issue to propose a change to this list.

1. Settings UI

Nightcap is configured by editing ~/.config/mocktail/config.yaml. Most people never open it, so they never find the FPS unlock or the vsync switch.

Goal: a small GTK4 settings window, reachable from the app menu and from a --settings flag, that reads and writes the same config.yaml.

• Graphics tab: backend, frame rate limit, vsync, small texture upscale.
• Input tab: the input.raw_mouse toggle and controller options.
• Advanced tab: FFlag overrides with a plain text editor for fflags.json.
• Discord tab: the discord_rpc block (see item 3).
• Changes apply on next launch. A restart button restarts Nightcap.

Done when every option in config/mocktail.example.yaml that a player would touch can be set without a text editor.

2. Controller button glyphs

Upstream added Xbox and PlayStation gamepad support through SDL. Controllers already hot-plug and release their held inputs when unplugged. One rough edge is left.

• Correct button glyphs for the connected pad. SDL_GetGamepadType is only read for Xbox and PlayStation pads, so a Switch Pro, a GameCube pad, or any generic pad SDL reports as SDL_GAMEPAD_TYPE_STANDARD reaches Roblox as type 0 and draws generic glyphs. SDL_GetRealGamepadType, and the vendor and product IDs, are available and unused.

Done when a plugged-in pad shows its own buttons.

3. Discord Rich Presence

Upstream ships Discord RPC. Nightcap turns it on by default; see the FAQ to switch it off. It shows the experience name, elapsed time, the experience icon, and a join button when the server is public.

• Custom presence: set the title, details line, state line, and large and small icons from config.yaml, with placeholders like the experience name and elapsed time.
• A Discord tab in the settings window to toggle each field.

Done when a friend can see what you are playing and join in one click, and you can switch it all off in one click.

4. Performance profiling

Every performance change should come with numbers. Today they come with a feeling.

• A frame time overlay, toggled by a key and a config flag, showing CPU time, GPU time, and present latency.
• Shader compile and pipeline cache tracing, so first-load stutter can be measured and cut.
• A --profile flag that writes a Chrome-format trace file, readable in ui.perfetto.dev and chrome://tracing.
• A short benchmark guide in docs/ with a fixed set of experiences, so before and after numbers can be compared across machines.

Done when a pull request that claims a speedup can show the trace that proves it.

Shipped

• Lower input latency: frames are presented as soon as they are ready.
• Controllers hot-plug without a restart, and a pad that is unplugged mid-game releases its held buttons and sticks instead of leaving them stuck.
• Mouse look keeps responding after a long turn, instead of going dead until the pointer travels back from past the screen edge.
• Optional raw mouse input: input.raw_mouse in config.yaml sends look deltas in host units, so fractional display scaling no longer changes first-person sensitivity.
• Small textures upscaled 4x by default, with PNG overrides in ~/.config/mocktail/textures.
• ETC2 textures decoded on desktop GPUs without stutter.
• No more error 319 kicks after joining a server.
• Roblox sees the real host RAM and screen size.
• Desktop launcher that works on Wayland and finds the installed binary.
• Discord Rich Presence on by default.
• Own app ID io.github.CoderDayton.nightcap, so Nightcap installs next to upstream.
• AppImage and signed Flatpak releases on every v* tag, with the Flatpak repo on GitHub Pages.

Not planned

• Replacing the mocktail binary and config names. Keeping them makes upstream merges clean.
• DEB, RPM, and AUR packages. Upstream ships those for unmodified Mocktail.