Playnite 11 development update

Hi everybody,

Current release plan

Here's my updated release plan for P11. I originally wanted to have something out by the end of this year but I don't think it's going to happen. I set new deadline to myself for end of January, to release something testable, so hopefully I can live up to that.

Here's what's going to be included in the alpha:

• Desktop mode

• practically all core features planned for final version P11

• theming system mostly finished but with some caveats (more below)

• complete plugin system

• Steam and GOG plugins. I think those would be most useful for testing purposes. I don't want to spend time porting all my other library integrations in case there will be some major changes to plugin system needed.

• Emulation support plugin. As I mentioned in some previous posts, emulation support in P11 will be done as a separate plugin instead of being hard coded into Playnite. This first iteration will be more or less port of P10 functionality but I do plan to make bigger changes for final release.

• bugs

What is not going to be included:

• Fullscreen mode

• addon browser and system for publishing and updating addons

• any sort of data migration from P10

After that I plan to release two sets of betas:

Beta 1 with all features included with an exception of online addon browser and installer, followed by Beta 2 which with that addon browser included. Not sure how long it will take for Beta 1 to come out after alpha, it mainly depends on how well work on Fullscreen mode progresses and of course on general feedback from alpha testers.

I'm also not sure about P11 release plan for integration plugins I currently maintain, because there will be a lot of work on those, especially since they will now include achievements support as well and they need to be completely rewritten (not necessarily because of SDK changes but because their code base is terrible). I would also love to have plugins like Epic and GOG to optionally support their alternative open source implementations, but that's probably going to happen after P11 release.

As far as missing Fullscreen mode in the Alpha, I'm still battling with a system that would allow plugins to provide Fullscreen compatible views. The problem is that to have proper controller support, Fullscreen mode uses customized controls and not the standard WPF ones (because WPF itself doesn't support controller input nor supports adding custom input devices). The simple solution would be moving all these controls to the SDK package but that would cause other issues and add extra dependencies to the SDK that I don't really want to do. Controller support in Fullscreen mode right now is full of various hacks and workarounds so I would love to have something more maintainable going into the future.

This is where I'm still planning to experiment with Avalonia, because Avalonia added support for proper keyboard based navigation this year (not a controller support but Avalonia is way easier to bend to my needs if needed compared to WPF). So there is a possibility of Fullscreen mode running on Avalonia while Desktop mode running on WPF in final P11 release. It would not be ideal, but themes have to be already done completely separate between modes and they require completely different UX anyways, so it might not be big issue. Also from what I remember there's not that many people that make both Desktop and Fullscreen themes, so most people would not need to learn both WPF and Avalonia.

As far as theming not being complete in the Alpha, that's related to customizable game view that I mentioned in some previous update. Basically I want users to be able to include any plugin element on any view no matter what theme they are using. I've experimented with multiple things, but eventually come into conclusion that it will be basically impossible to have game view customizable by users (in some user friendly way) and also give themes full control over game view layout. I'll try to brainstorm this with people on Discord, but Alpha release will have a system similar to how it works now in P10.

Avalonia story continues...

As I mentioned in my previous mini update, I ended up deciding that P11 will stay on WPF (at least for sure in Desktop mode). Primarily still because developer experience is still not great and I had to scratch all my attempts trying to improve it myself because of time constrains. This is primarily related to some sort of good visual design tool, especially for theme development. I actually started developing custom UI design tool for Avalonia (generic one that would benefit all Avalonia projects, not just Playnite), which came from my originally scrapped plans for visual game view designer, but I realized that his is essentially full time project on its own so I had to stop working it.

There's still also an issue with Avalonia not having good and affordable web view component that I would be happy using in Playnite (you basically have options between affordable and good, but not both at the same time, at least not with multi-platform support).

The good news is that Avalonia team recently announced that they plan to actually implement official visual designer. The bad news is that it will be paid product. They said they plan to aim for low cost high volume licensing, so hopefully it will be affordable for people making themes.

Kind of offsetting that is another good news that Rider, alternative .NET development IDE with only actually usable, in my opinion, Avalonia preview plugin is now free. While not a fully fledged visual designer, it works well as real time preview and XAML editing experience is really good. I think this would be kind of usable for theme devs, although not ideal.

Closing words

I'm really sorry that there won't be anything P11 related released this year, it's really massive project, especially with Desktop and Fullscreen modes having widely different requirements and the whole thing of jumping between WPF and Avalonia. In retrospect, I probably spent way too much time on various Avalonia versions and experiments, and should have made it all WPF from the start, with some design choices to have more painless future Avalonia upgrade.

I really want to have P11 as best base for Playnite going forward as possible, not to rush it and end up with code base similar to what P10 is, which I really can't go back to anymore and work on, it's demoralizing working on that spaghetti code.

As always, thank you very much for continued support!

Josef