upcomingfeatures.txt

Pixilate stars in night shader (removed because it required tracking to the camera)

Improved nether portal shader including transparency and light emittence

Special ice shader

Additional lighting styles based on time of day

Nether and end environment shaders

Better glass shader

Additional user-controllable variables for water shaders (Turbitity option, waviness option, color and/or volume absorsion/clarity option)
  Probably requires restructuring water shader

Proper texturing for wood logs (all surfaces use outer texture)
  Might require with new texturing pieces

Rotation of sunflowers based on time of day
  Requires altering geometry
  Requires basic trig calculations

Varying light levels for emitting blocks
  Might require restructuring of block metadata to be feasible

Animated background stars
  Requires scripting of parts of the engine not yet explored (timeline)
  
Sprites for sun and moon
  Requires access to texture files that aren't currently provided

Restructuring block metadata
  Large amounts of work
  Proper data structure needs to be better defined
    Arrays vs. objects vs. dictionaries, etc.
    What best suits legibility, extensibility, and features?
  Massively alters codebase
  Needs to contain fields of some sort for varying intensities (light intensities, fresnel values)

Lower noise lighting (possibly using invisible light emitters that only show on diffuse rays)
  Difficult to figure out what the issue is
    Might require using geometry
  On light blocks that do not take up the entire block space:
     Need to use invisible light emitters that only show in shadows
  Requires knowledge of how Cycles works and how to reduce noise

GUI for options and execution
  Requires exploring portions of Blender Python not explored

Support for connected textures
  Requires texture files not currently passed by Mineways
  This will likely be an all-Mineways addtion (no extra python scripting)

Clouds (2D and 3D)
  2D and 3D, Minecrafty and "real"
  Difficult to understand and write
    The way how light reflects off clouds in the real world is very complex
    The way how minecraft's clouds are formed shouldn't be too hard node-tree wise
  Will likely require changing geometry

Animated textures
  Defaults from Minecraft
  Grass, leaves, fire, and torches will need animations
  Difficult to structure
  Might require access to animated texture files which isn't currently provided
  Requires scripting of parts of the engine not yet explored (timeline)

Support for different weather types
  Difficult to understand and write
  Rain sources need to be placed somewhere if particles are used
    Requires adding geometry
  Might require scripting of parts of the engine not yet explored (physics, particles, timeline)

Better fire including embers, in the spirit of both Minecraft and real fire using the builtin engine
  Difficult to understand and write
    Setting up fire in blender is overly complex node-tree wise at the moment; will requre lots of work
  Likely requires changing geometry
  Requires scripting of parts of the engine not yet explored (physics, particles, timeline, smoke and fire)

Better grass using inbuilt hair engine
  Requires scripting of parts of the engine not yet explored (physics, hair "particles")
  Likely requires changing geometry
  When the user scales their world model, the hair will not go with it

Importing other models (such as characters and mobs)
  Requires large amounts of information not currently passed by Mineways