Phaethon

News

What landed, what was measured, and what was decided, written as it happened.

Latest

Notes from the work.

findings, decisions and measurements, in the order they happened · nothing here is a promise

The compiler console opens with the Seal of Mar

goalc's welcome, help, greeting and prompt were rewritten for Phaethon, and its status lines now print in the runtime's own log shape. Nine commits, twenty-one rows seen red first, one train.

toolsrelease

what landed with it

+8.695INFOmakeSuccessfully built all 968 targets in 8.449s ORACLEgarage[garage] OK [garage-s1] OK [garage-vk] OK GATEuniformsGREEN, every uniform located CItrain 2705five jobs green, merged f183c49b
Earlier

Everything before that.

playphaethon.com

The project has its own domain. The site, the docs, the download host, the account service and the sign-in realm all moved to it in one afternoon; only the forge stays where it was.

Accounts, sessions and saves that follow you

The launcher signs a player in to Phaethon, reports what they play, and now keeps their saves under their account with a per-account quota. Release candidate six carries all of it.

The launcher is signed

From release candidate three the installer and the updater carry a signing identity, so Windows stops warning about an unknown publisher. What it took to get a certificate into a CI runner.

The repository, restructured

Fifteen rungs moved the tree into compiler, runtime, common and test, retired the paths nothing read, and left every tool reading the new places. All fifteen landed under one milestone.

Two ladders of kernel rungs

The load waits that spun a core now wait on a signal, the IOP host sleeps to its real deadline, and the listener's send left the game thread. Each rung says whether the game could observe it, and Jak 1 to 3 booted for every one.

Where a race frame's time goes

A cost map of a Jak X race frame: about 1.1 ms of movable recording in a 4.9 ms Vulkan frame, of which the largest family cannot move (#2163, #2198, #2211, #2212).

OpenGL out, Vulkan in: four decisions

volk, dynamic rendering, one shader source compiled for both backends, and a simple suballocator over the memory library, with the four constraints that shaped them and the ones that were refused.

Phaethon leaves the tree

The fork becomes its own line. What it keeps from OpenGOAL, what it changes on day one, and why nothing goes back upstream.

Follow

Where the news comes from.

Feed

Every post, as it is published, in a feed your reader can subscribe to.

news/feed.xml

Changelog

Every release, in the launcher's own words, the moment it ships.

the changelog

Trains

Each landing on develop, with its pipeline verdict and its CI result, on the forge.

merged trains

Community

Testers and players compare notes, share captures and report what a disc did.

The Discord server is on its way.
Phaethon

Built with AI in the loop. Phaethon uses AI assistance for speed and accuracy, and holds it to the same bar as every other contribution: every change is read, tested and checked against the console before it lands.

develop f183c49b CI green v0.2.0-rc6 26 Sep 2026