Unreal Engine 4 maker Epic Games made public its roadmap for the technology's development today, opening up its plans for the future of the engine on a massive board that is updated in real time.
The board is hosted on Trello, a project management tool that allows individuals to organize tasks and track progress on a web-based board.
"Our hope with being more transparent in our development processes is that we'll generate more value for developers working with [Unreal Engine 4], both in understanding what's likely to appear in upcoming releases and also in having more context around how the engine is being built (and a little bit of the why)," said Ray Davis, general manager for the Unreal Engine, in a post on the Unreal Engine blog today.
On the Unreal Engine 4 Trello board, planned features are listed as card under categories such as animation, rendering, physics and platforms, and are labeled with the months during which Epic is aiming to implement them in the engine. For example, SteamVR integration is on the docket for June, according to the feature's card, with plans to support "multiple VR devices" and "open-room VR experiences." Also on the virtual reality front, Epic is working to finalize its initial support for Sony's Project Morpheus headset this month.
Davis cautioned that some features on the board may not make it into the engine in the time frame indicated, since "we may run into complications that push out a feature, or we may have reason to stop working on it altogether." Certain elements are labeled as being in the backlog, on Epic's wish list, and they "may never see the light of day either."
According to Davis, making this board public is "one step of many we plan to take to build full transparency around our development process." Unreal Engine 4 is now open to developers for a $19 per month subscription. The most recent major update, version 4.1, added support for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Linux and SteamOS last month.