acdream/docs/plans/2026-05-12-milestones.md

acdream — milestones (morale + scope layer)

Status: Living document. Created 2026-05-12. Sits above: docs/plans/2026-04-11-roadmap.md (the strategic phase index). Currently working toward: M1 — Walkable + clickable world.

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Why this document exists

The roadmap is a phase index — week- to month-scale, ~50 phases by the time v1.0 lands. Phases ship in vertical slices (architecture-first, horizontal completion deferred), which is the right strategy for a solo open-source project at this scale — but it leaves a chronic "everything is half-built" feeling because no single phase ship feels like a real milestone.

This document sits one altitude above the roadmap. Each milestone is:

• ~6–10 weeks of focused work (not a single phase, not a whole year).
• Defined by a concrete playable scenario that gets recorded as a demo video when the milestone hits.
• A scope-freeze event: when a milestone lands, the phases it covers go off-limits until v1.0's final polish pass (M7).

Crossing a milestone is a real event with an artifact. Phases ship; milestones land.

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Operating rules

1. One active milestone at a time. Everything not on the critical path to the current milestone gets filed in docs/ISSUES.md with a post-MN tag and explicitly muted until the milestone hits. This is what kills the jumping-between-things feeling.

2. Frozen phases are off-limits. "Frozen" means no rework, no polish, no follow-up commits unless something is actively broken (player crash, regression). Visual nice-to-haves, "while I'm here" cleanups, and architecture second-guesses are all post-M7. The freeze is the discipline mechanism that makes the milestone meaningful — without it, M0's many shipped phases keep silently consuming attention.

3. The milestone log is the morale instrument. When a milestone hits:

   • Record a ~30-second demo video showing the scenario end-to-end.
   • Drop it in docs/milestones/MN-<slug>.mp4 (create the directory on first hit).
   • Pin a still frame + one-paragraph writeup at the top of this doc.
   • Update the freeze list. Update CLAUDE.md's "currently working toward" line to the next milestone.

4. State both altitudes at session start. "Currently working toward M1. Current phase: L.2 collision. Next concrete step: L.2d slice 1 spec." This keeps the high-level orientation visible alongside the immediate task and makes mid-session drift obvious.

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The milestones

M0 — "Connect & explore" — ✅ DONE (crossed months ago)

Demo scenario: Log in, walk Holtburg in chase camera, see other characters animate, send a chat message and see the echo, watch day turn to night, listen to footsteps and ambient audio.

Phases included (frozen):

Phase	What landed
1–3	Terrain + per-vertex normals + per-cell texture blending
4	UDP codec + handshake + character login + WorldSession
5	ObjDesc: AnimPartChange + TextureChanges + SubPalettes + ObjScale
6.1–6.7	Motion + animation foundation (idle, frame playback, slerp, UpdateMotion, UpdatePosition)
7.1	EnvCell room geometry — walls/floors/ceilings
9.1–9.2	Translucent render pass + back-face culling
A.1–A.5	Streaming landblock loader → two-tier streaming
B.1–B.3	Outbound ack pump + player movement + physics MVP resolver
D.1, D.2a	2D overlay + ImGui scaffold + AcDream.UI.Abstractions layer
E.1–E.5	Motion hooks + audio + particles + combat wire + spell wire
F.1, F.2	GameEvent dispatcher + item model + Appraise
G.1, G.2	Sky + day/night + weather + dynamic lighting
H.1, I.1–I.8	Chat wire + UI consolidation + holtburger inbound parity + combat translator
K, L.0	Input architecture + retail bindings + Settings panel
N.0–N.6.1	WB rendering migration (modern path mandatory)
C.1, C.1.5a/b	Particle system + portal/EnvCell static-script wiring
R.1–R.3	Retail research infrastructure (PDB extract + named decomp)

Status: This is everything shipped through 2026-05-12. ~25 phase ships. Worth saying out loud: this is the hard half of the project. The engine runs, the world renders correctly, the network connects, the input is wired, the data layers for combat/spells/items/audio/particles all exist. What's missing is the gameplay loop on top.

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M1 — "Walkable + clickable world" — 🟡 CURRENT (~4–6 weeks)

Demo scenario: Walk through Holtburg without getting stuck on the inn doorway. Open the inn door. Click an NPC and see selection feedback. Pick up an item from the ground.

Phases to ship:

• L.2 (all sub-lanes a–g) — Movement & Collision Conformance. L.2a slices 1+2+3 + L.2d slice 1+1.5 + L.2g slice 1 (code) shipped 2026-05-12. L.2g slice 1 visual verification deferred to B.4b session (the inbound SetState chain can't fire until the outbound Use sends).
• B.4 / B.4b — Use / UseWithTarget / PickUp interaction. B.4 (2026-04-28) shipped the wire builders, SelectionState, WorldPicker, the input-action enums, and the keybindings — but not the GameWindow.OnInputAction handler that ties them together. As of 2026-05-12, clicking on a door silently does nothing. B.4b is the small follow-up slice (~30-50 LOC) that subscribes SelectDblLeft and routes through pick → BuildUse → send. Once B.4b lands, the same Holtburg-doorway visual test verifies both L.2g slice 1 and B.4b in one pass.

Freeze on landing:

• L.2 zone (collision, cell ownership, transition parity, wire authority)
• B.4 zone (interaction outbound)

What "M1 lands" looks like: the existing Holtburg traversal works as a retail player would expect. Doorways are walkable. Buildings have solid walls. Outdoor cell seams report the right cell. Clicking an NPC selects it and sends a usable selection state to the server. The Use action opens doors.

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M2 — "Kill a drudge" — 🔵 NEXT (~6–10 weeks after M1)

Demo scenario: Equip a sword. Walk to a drudge. Swing. See "You hit Drudge for 12 slashing damage (87%)" in chat. Watch the swing animation play. Drudge dies, drops loot. Pick up the loot. Open the inventory panel and see it.

Phases to ship:

• F.2 (panels) — Inventory panel reading ItemRepository (data already shipped in F.2 base; M2 ships the visual surface).
• F.3 — Combat math + damage flow.
• F.5a — Visible-at-login dev panels (Attributes, Skills, Equipped, Inventory list) — minimal ImGui surfaces, retail-skin deferred to M5.
• L.1c — Combat animation wiring (draw/sheath, attack swings by stance/power/height, hit reactions, evades).
• L.1b — Command router + motion-state cleanup (prereq for L.1c).

Freeze on landing:

• Combat math zone
• Inventory zone (data + dev panel; retail-skin reopens in M5)
• L.1b/c combat-animation zone

What "M2 lands" looks like: the gameplay loop is real. You can fight, take damage, kill things, see loot, manage your inventory. The game becomes a game.

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M3 — "Cast a spell" — 🔵 (~3–4 weeks after M2)

Demo scenario: Cast Flame Bolt at a drudge. Watch the cast animation, the projectile, the impact. Self-cast a buff (Strength Self). See the enchantment in a buff list. Recall to lifestone — full recall animation, correct teleport, correct re-spawn.

Phases to ship:

• F.4 — Spell cast state machine (buffs + recalls first, projectile spells second).
• L.1d — Spell-casting animation wiring (cast command classification, windup, release, fizzle/interruption, recoil).
• F.5 (Spellbook panel) — dev-skin surface for learned spells + active enchantments.

Freeze on landing:

• F.4 spell zone
• L.1d cast-animation zone
• Spellbook dev-panel surface

What "M3 lands" looks like: mages are real characters. Buffs work, recalls work, the first projectile spells work. Combat from M2 + casting from M3 = retail-equivalent gameplay loop for melee and casters.

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M4 — "Live in the world" — 🔵 (~6–10 weeks)

Demo scenario: Create a fresh character from scratch (no ACE admin). Spawn. Talk to an NPC. Accept a quest. Walk to a dungeon entrance. Portal in (pink-bubble loading). Walk through the dungeon. Complete the quest. Walk back out.

Phases to ship:

• H.3 — Emote scripts + quests + dialogs (122 EmoteType × 39 Trigger mini-VM).
• G.3 — Dungeon streaming + portal space + PlayerTeleport handling. (Unblocked by L.2e from M1.)
• H.4 — Character creation (0xE000002 CharGen + heritages + appearance picker + preview).
• L.1e — Emote + posture animation wiring.

Freeze on landing:

• H.3 dialog/quest zone
• G.3 dungeon zone
• H.4 character-creation zone
• L.1e emote-animation zone

What "M4 lands" looks like: the world feels populated and interactive. You can do quests, enter dungeons, create characters. Combined with M2/M3, the client is functionally playable — minus visual polish.

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M5 — "Looks like retail" — 🟢 PARALLELIZABLE WITH M3/M4 (~4–8 weeks)

Demo scenario: Side-by-side screenshot of acdream vs retail at the same location, same time of day, same character. Hard to tell apart at a glance. Open the inventory panel — retail-skinned with the right font, icons, and 9-slice panel borders.

Phases to ship:

• C.1.5c — Sky-PES dispatch chain (closes #2 lightning, #28 aurora, #29 cloud thinness).
• C.2 — Dynamic point lights (fireplaces, lamps, torches with proper local lighting).
• C.3 — Palette range tuning (skin/hair/eye colors match retail).
• C.4 — Double-sided translucent polys.
• D.2b — Custom retail-look UI backend.
• D.3–D.7 — AcFont + dat sprites + core panels reskinned + HUD orbs + cursor manager.
• L.1f — NPC/monster + item-use animation coverage.

Freeze on landing:

• Visual polish zone (C.1.5c, C.2, C.3, C.4)
• D.2b → D.7 UI-skin zone
• L.1f NPC-anim zone

What "M5 lands" looks like: the client visually convinces. Screenshots become postable. The "old / broken vs retail" feeling that drives most of the chronic ISSUES.md entries is gone.

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M6 — "Plugins ship" — 🟢 (~4 weeks)

Demo scenario: A third party (not you) writes a small plugin against the published API — XP tracker, loot logger, simple chat filter — and it loads cleanly. Sample plugin lives in the repo with documented build steps.

Phases to ship:

• Plugin API surface: stable contract over AcDream.Core + AcDream.UI.Abstractions, versioned, with the world-state interfaces exposed.
• Plugin host: load isolation, lifecycle, error containment.
• Sample plugin (XP tracker or loot logger) — proves the API by using it.
• Plugin docs page.

Freeze on landing:

• Plugin API v1 surface (additive changes only post-freeze).

What "M6 lands" looks like: the differentiator vs the retail client is real. acdream offers something retail never did, and the API is documented well enough that other people can build on it.

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M7 — "v1.0" — 🟢 (open-ended polish)

Demo scenario: Long-running stress test: log in, play for 4 hours across outdoor + dungeon + portal + combat + spell + chat scenarios, reconnect once mid-session, log out clean. No crashes, no protocol errors, no visual regressions, no audio dropouts.

Phases to ship:

• Phase M — Network stack conformance (retransmit, ACK piggybacking, echo/keepalive, fragment splitting, typed actions). Deferred until now because ACE handles loss gracefully — but v1.0 needs proper network hardening.
• H.2 — Allegiance.
• N.6 slice 2 + N.7–N.10 — Finish WB rendering migration (EnvCells, sky/particles via WB, visibility manager, GL infrastructure consolidation).
• Phase J long-tail — Player rig polish, group/fellowship UI, trade window, salvage/tinker UI, house ownership, society UI, dev-mode tools.
• L.1g — Animation polish + conformance.
• Final visual + audio polish pass against ISSUES.md chronic backlog.

What "M7 lands" looks like: v1.0. Ship.

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Estimated timeline

Milestone	Effort	Cumulative
M0	DONE	DONE
M1	~4–6 wk	~5 wk
M2	~6–10 wk	~13 wk
M3	~3–4 wk	~17 wk
M4	~6–10 wk	~25 wk
M5	~4–8 wk (parallel)	overlaps M3/M4
M6	~4 wk	~29 wk
M7	open-ended	v1.0

Roughly 9–12 months of focused solo work from 2026-05-12 to v1.0. That's honest for an open-source project of this scale. The biggest single rock is M2 (combat math + animations + inventory panels lining up); M5 can be chipped at in parallel by subagents while you drive M3/M4.

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What this document is not

• Not a release schedule. Internal morale + scope layer only. If acdream goes public-alpha at some point, that's a separate decision built on top of one of these milestones.
• Not immutable. When reality and the milestones diverge, update the milestones in the same session you discover the divergence. Same rule as the roadmap.
• Not a replacement for the roadmap. Phases are still where the implementation details live. This doc is the orientation layer above them.
• Not granular enough for daily work. Daily work happens at the phase / sub-phase / commit level. The milestone is the multi-week target you're aiming at.