Phaethon

Progress

Where each game stands today, and the record of how it got here, one landing at a time.

Today

Where each game stands.

read from the tree at develop f183c49b · 26 Sep 2026

Playable

Jak and Daxter

Runs start to finish with the fork's retail-behavior fixes. 533 source files in the tree.

Playable

Jak II

Runs start to finish with the fork's retail-behavior fixes. 849 source files in the tree.

Playable

Jak 3

Runs start to finish with the fork's retail-behavior fixes. 1041 source files in the tree.

In progress

Jak X

Boots, loads its levels, races and fights; the online layer and the remaining modes are on the roadmap. 776 source files in the tree.

The record

How it got here, one landing at a time.

each date is the merge that landed it on develop, linked where it has a number · the fork itself is dated from the project record

July 2026

A live kernel dispatcher

level.gc decompiled and the kernel's dispatcher reached from a Jak X boot for the first time.

jakxkerneldeb7fe27c3

The first windowed boot

Jak X survives thirty seconds in a window with the OpenGL renderer live.

jakxboot86ca997076

The first real level

The boot lands in brdroom, the first level with world geometry, and the bring-up camera warps onto it.

jakxlevels83d9efb25d

The track streams

The track section window streams with race-position wants, and a continue point boots with its camera framing.

jakxlevels423384f723
August 2026

Bring-up joins develop

The bring-up branch merges; from here the work ships as themed branches, one pull request per theme.

project54b39fd68d

The race start chain

The vehicle-free half of the race start chain lands, and the boot points at the track with its borrow pairs pre-baked.

jakxracing7a86952e03
September 2026

Phaethon leaves the tree

The hard fork is declared: nothing goes upstream, nothing comes from it, and the fork carries its own name.

project52b23bbabe

Weapons on the road

The weapon pickup road lands, combat's fourth rung, with wvehicle's spawn-time road probe beside it.

jakxcombat#1655

Tutorials, death race and training

Tutorial leg A, the whole of net-deathrace and the first slice of net-training land, with the weapon particle object.

jakxmodes#1663

A race gets a session master

Methods 20 and 41 land so a race has a session master; the finish dispatch clears the HUD under the results, wrecks detach and throw their wheels, walls deal damage.

jakxracing#1862

Death Race, drones and all

The Death Race mode's drone spawn parts and its own HUD spawner land, with the oil slick and wheel fire arms of the vehicle set handler.

jakxmodes#1903

The frame oracle

Reference frames from the console's own scenes, four peak scenes among them, judge every pass that reaches the picture before it lands.

renderermethod#2088

Vulkan comes up

Rung 0 passes the device layer's self test and rung 1 clears a frame in a Vulkan window behind a flag.

renderer#2117

Whole frames match

Rung 3: whole frames under Vulkan match OpenGL and the Vulkan window draws the game; rung 4 refuses a frame that loses a draw.

renderer#2158

Lighting and ray tracing foundations

The light list becomes its own data with a light pass judged by the oracle, and the ray tracing foundation lands: the feature probe and the acceleration structure verbs.

rendererlighting#2184

Where a race frame's time goes

The replay prints each bucket's own time: the garage frame at 7.11 ms under OpenGL and 6.11 under Vulkan, a quarter of it in one car paint bucket.

renderermeasurement#2171

The temporal ladder lands

A TAA resolve at the head of the cut, DLAA and DLSS through NGX called directly, the jitter length and sign fixed live, the mip bias and three modes, and FSR 3.1 across vendors, all behind the remastered preset.

renderer#2210

Two ladders of kernel rungs

Load waits that spun a core now wait on a signal, the IOP host sleeps to its real deadline, the listener's send leaves the game thread; Jak 1 to 3 boot for every rung.

kernel

The repository, restructured

Fifteen rungs move the tree into compiler, runtime, common and test, and develop becomes the integration line again.

project#2599

The launcher is signed

From release candidate three the installer carries a signing identity; the Vulkan SDK reaches both Windows runners.

launcher

Accounts, saves and a domain

The account service keeps sessions, progress and saves per account, release candidate six ships, and the project moves to playphaethon.com.

launcherservicesite

The console opens with the Seal of Mar

goalc's welcome, help, greeting, prompt and status lines rewritten for Phaethon, landed as one train.

tools#2705
Ahead

Vectors for foliage and menus

Swaying foliage carries no motion vector and the holographic menus flicker under the temporal passes; each gets its own.

renderer

The frame graph

An explicit dependency model for the enhancement passes, replacing hooks on bucket ids.

renderer

Online play for Jak X

The game's own session, lobby and race code running between two machines again.

jakxonline

A Linux launcher

The runtime already builds and boots on Linux; the launcher follows.

launcher
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