Changelog

Release notes

Every build of Sektor, newest first. New renderer, gameplay, and editor features land almost daily during early access. This is the same feed the in-engine launcher reads.

0.8.0 Jul 16, 2026 Delivery & Studio

Engine fixes can now reach creators quickly without risking their work

Studio detects new engine releases, saves before handing off, and reopens the same project after a verified install. The launcher refreshes itself automatically, while engine updates remain an explicit creator choice.

  • Studio checks the global release manifest at startup and every ten minutes, then presents a clear Update available action without interrupting editing.
  • The update flow saves the active project, closes safely, installs through the launcher, and reopens the same project after activation.
  • Engine downloads use immutable versioned packages with outer and per-file SHA-256 verification, safe archive extraction, atomic activation, and retained rollback.
  • Launcher and engine releases are independent: the lightweight launcher keeps its news and service UI current automatically, while engine installation always requires a click.
  • Release publishing uploads the immutable package first and the global manifest last, and can run as a background job so development does not wait on distribution.
  • Installed Studio now resolves its native runtime and user projects outside the source checkout, closing the public Launch-button gap.
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0.7.0 Jul 14, 2026 Core Engine

Large worlds stream predictably while the renderer does less work

Sektor's new job, visibility, GPU-scene and render-graph foundations scale dense worlds without changing deterministic gameplay, while budgeted World Partition streaming, temporal upscaling, profiling and crash recovery make performance observable and enforceable.

  • A bounded work-stealing job system now parallelizes renderer preparation and asset work while authoritative gameplay simulation remains single-threaded and deterministic.
  • Visibility Pipeline v2 combines parallel frustum and screen-size culling, distance fades, two-phase hierarchical-depth occlusion, state-sorted submission and adjacent instance merging.
  • GPUScene-lite keeps stable primitive and instance records resident on the GPU and uploads only dirty ranges for colour, shadow and visibility work.
  • RDG-lite derives resource transitions, reuses transient memory and merges compatible render passes instead of scattering manual barrier ownership through the renderer.
  • World Partition v1 pages cells through prioritized camera and gameplay sources with a hard activation-time budget, bounded decode/upload bytes, retention-aware eviction and far-cell stand-ins.
  • The vendor-neutral temporal upscaler adds deterministic Halton jitter, motion-vector reprojection, disocclusion rejection and Native, Quality, Balanced and Performance modes.
  • Studio can record and inspect .sektortrace captures; out-of-process crash recovery preserves diagnostics, and Release forest/streaming fixtures enforce hard performance budgets.
  • Launcher-to-Studio startup now has an automated smoke gate so a build cannot be treated as launchable if its workspace or native editor exits during initialization.
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0.6.0 Jul 13, 2026 Gameplay & AI

Agents avoid each other, audio goes event-driven, and builds preflight themselves

Deterministic local avoidance and tiled cached navmesh cooking complete the navigation stack, runtime audio becomes a fully event-driven system, characters crouch safely, and Build Game validates every component before staging a package.

  • Deterministic reciprocal avoidance: agents flow around each other with per-agent horizon, neighbor distance and priority controls, and exact restart proof.
  • Tiled navmesh cooking with SHA-256 source fingerprints and a persistent cache, so editing one corner rebuilds only the dirty tiles.
  • Event-driven runtime audio: play, pause, resume, stop, gain and fixed-tick fades with picked-instance precision, plus spatial blend and completion triggers. Saves restore playback to the exact sample.
  • Reusable Event Sheet includes: a Primary sheet composes library sheets, diamond dependencies run once per tick, and cycles are rejected at authoring time.
  • Obstruction-safe character crouch with hold or toggle modes and stance recovery that waits for overhead clearance.
  • One shared world-geometry source now feeds physics and navigation, with terrain deriving a physics heightfield automatically.
  • Build Game now runs a compatibility preflight that names every unsupported component or broken reference before staging begins.
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0.5.0 Jul 13, 2026 Navigation & AI

Weighted terrain and cross-surface links land in navigation

Agents now weight named areas like water and mud, and cross-surface jump, climb and teleport links stitch separate navmeshes into a single route. All deterministic, all replay-safe.

  • Named navigation areas: tag a volume as water, mud or road and the label bakes into the navmesh, with overlaps resolved by priority.
  • Per-agent area costs from 0.01 to 1000, so different agents route differently across the same navmesh with no extra bake.
  • Cross-surface links: linear, jump and teleport connections bridge separate navmesh surfaces, and each agent opts in by link type.
  • Recast navmesh baking runs asynchronously off the main thread; Detour pathfinding returns sampled points, total length and reachability.
  • Wired through the component registry, inspector, control protocol and serialization, so an AI collaborator can author it all.
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0.4.0 Jul 13, 2026 Shipping

Package a project into a standalone build

Build Game exports a project to the SektorPlayer runtime, with no editor and no source checkout required.

  • Build Game assembles a package manifest, gathers scenes, assets, events and settings with their runtime dependencies, and writes a distributable build.
  • Packaged games run on SektorPlayer, the dedicated runtime driving tick, render, input, audio, physics, navigation and UI.
  • The same fixed-timestep, deterministic replay contract as Play mode, so a shipped build behaves exactly like the editor.
  • Packaging is exposed through the control protocol, so an automated pipeline or an AI collaborator can build too.
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0.3.0 Jul 12, 2026 Gameplay

Visual logic, runtime UI, animation and save games

Author game logic with Construct-style event sheets, build in-game interfaces, drive skeletal animation, and persist player progress.

  • Construct-style event sheets: typed variables, functions and a guided expression builder, where conditions pick objects and actions change the world, all deterministic and undoable.
  • Deterministic event scheduling for timed and delayed logic.
  • A full runtime UI authoring workspace: event-bound widgets rendered in-engine with deterministic interaction.
  • Genre-neutral skeletal animation with state machines and cross-fades.
  • Player save games for persistent progress.
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0.2.0 Jul 12, 2026 Simulation

Real physics and a character you can drive

Jolt physics on a fixed tick, a playable character, and a camera that behaves.

  • Jolt Physics runs a fixed-tick, deterministic simulation of rigid bodies, triggers and queries, authored right in the inspector.
  • Playable character input with camera-relative third-person controls.
  • An obstruction-safe gameplay camera that keeps the character in view.
  • Collision event instance picking and genre-neutral runtime pointer policies.
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0.1.0 Jul 12, 2026 Renderer

The foundation: a modern DirectX 12 renderer

A clustered forward renderer with shadows, temporal anti-aliasing and physical camera effects.

  • Clustered forward lighting with local light shadows.
  • Cascaded shadow maps and HDR image-based lighting with baked reflection probes.
  • Motion-compensated temporal anti-aliasing.
  • Physical camera motion blur and depth of field.
  • Atmosphere, area lights and tone mapping.
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