The runtime the launcher installs today is v0.1.0-rc5, cut on September 26th. A lot has happened since. Everything in the news since then, from Jak X's credits to the first online race, is on the development branch and not yet in your hands: 243 trains and 4,935 commits, 26 days of work. The next release carries all of it at once.
None of those days was a day off. A train reached the development branch on every one of them, no full day saw fewer than 100 commits, and the busiest, October 4th, saw 397. Counted by the hour, commits landed at every hour of the clock.
And none of it was left to run unattended. Most of this work is done with AI assistance, as the about page says, and every change in those 4,935 commits was read by me before it landed. That is where the pace comes from: not a machine left running, but the work read as fast as it is made.
What is waiting
- Jak X from its first race to its credits, reached on October 9th (Jak X, start to finish).
- Every preset at the console's 60 ticks a second, since October 3rd (Sixty ticks, at your display's rate).
- Jak X's sound, the trilogy's mix and the console's echo, since September 30th (Four games, three sound drivers).
- The console's distances in all four games, finished October 15th (Far away, the way the console drew it).
- Jak X on Phaethon's own texture animator, written to replace upstream's and running the disc's own drawing programs, since October 15th (Water that moves the way the disc says).
- No hand-translated vector code left, by October 13th (When the console settles the argument).
- The second controller the game asks for, since October 4th (The phantom second controller).
- Online play over LAN, raced between two machines on October 22nd (Bringing Jak X online, the direct way).
Planned, not landed yet
Two more are planned for it. Neither is finished yet, and the release will say plainly if one is not ready in time.
- Online play over the internet, through the Phaethon relay, past the LAN play that works today.
- Jak II and Jak 3 moved onto the same texture animator, retiring upstream's for good, the way Jak X already has.
How the runtime is delivered now
One more change, and it is a change of stance. Until now the runtime could be downloaded directly, by anyone, with no account. That has stopped. The launcher is still a public download, but the runtime and its updates now come only through the launcher, for a signed-in Phaethon account, so they cannot be pulled and passed around anonymously.
Nothing else changes. Once the runtime is installed, every game plays offline and signed out, the same as before.
When
No date yet. When it ships, the changelog lists what changed in the launcher's own words, and the launcher offers the update.
Alex (maintainer, and a mechanical engineer by trade)