Devlog

Washoi devlog

From a plant in a pot to an arena shooter in your browser. This is how Washiki Washoi! got built, one release at a time.

Chapter 2 · Jan 2026

Becoming a shooter

One month. Fifty barrels in one draw call and a plugin system, then arena maps with their lightmaps, skies, water and fog, then bunny hops, sprinting, crouching and collision that runs on the server too. The farming engine became a shooter.

v0.4.0

PerformanceJanuary 1, 2026

Fifty Barrels, One Draw Call

The ServiceLocator, an entity handler registry, GPU instancing, and quality auto-detection that took mobile from 20fps to 50.

The Release Where Inline Styles Went to Class

Four files. One pattern. Every hardcoded style string replaced with a CSS class, and a UIStyles module that finally exports what it builds.

The Engine Left the Browser

Electron desktop builds for Windows and Linux, a native menu bar, a single-instance lock, and NSIS plus AppImage output.

SOURCEv0.4.2.md

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v0.5.0

EngineJanuary 1, 2026

The Engine Became Pluggable

An ICameraController interface, four implementations, runtime and per-map controller selection, and nine new console commands.

The Release That Renamed the Examples

Documentation only. Every game-specific identifier in the engine's doc comments was replaced with a generic one.

A Controller File Lost Half Its Length

An action-based InputSystem with stacked contexts and per-frame press state, and two controllers cut by more than a third after adopting it.

Thirty Puffs of CSS

The loading screen's bottom glow was replaced by thirty blurred colour puffs that rise and fade, animated entirely without JavaScript.

SOURCEv0.6.1.md

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v0.7.0

RendererJanuary 2, 2026

The Engine Learned to Read Archives

PK3 support with priority ordering, four texture formats, Quake's _norm and _gloss conventions, and a memory inspector that can tell you what is using it all.

A Console You Can Resize

One command, Warsow-style: con_size takes a fraction of fullscreen height, persists to localStorage, and animates open and closed.

SOURCEv0.7.1.md

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v0.8.0

RendererJanuary 2, 2026

The Engine Meets a Quake Map

BSP loading, PK3 archives and the Quake shader system. The release where a TypeScript engine stopped being an engine and started being an arena shooter.

SOURCEv0.8.0.md

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v0.8.1

RendererJanuary 3, 2026

Lightmaps Were Already in Memory

Warsow's material directive, a lightmap applier with separate desktop and mobile paths, and the double-extension bug.

SOURCEv0.8.1.md

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v0.8.2

RendererJanuary 3, 2026

Six Faces, One Sky

surfaceparm sky detection, six-face skybox loading from PK3 archives, and a RawCubeTexture face order nobody had written down.

SOURCEv0.8.2.md

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v0.8.3

RendererJanuary 3, 2026

Clamp, Not Wrap

The loader directory split into bsp/, map/, model/, pk3/, shader/ and texture/, and one missing texture setting that made every tiled surface wrong.

SOURCEv0.8.3.md

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v0.8.4

RendererJanuary 3, 2026

Water That Moves on a Schedule

Shader animation: tcMod scroll, scale, rotate, stretch and turb, plus the full Quake wave function set.

SOURCEv0.8.4.md

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v0.8.5

RendererJanuary 4, 2026

Things That Refuse To Be Lit

surfaceparm nolightmap support, a real three-stage material pattern classifier, and a shader block merger that was wrong about deluxe lighting.

SOURCEv0.8.5.md

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v0.8.6

RendererJanuary 4, 2026

One Command Loads a Map

A djb2-hashed PK3 index cached in localStorage, and a loadMap pipeline that resolves every dependency a map needs before it draws anything.

SOURCEv0.8.6.md

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v0.8.7

PerformanceJanuary 4, 2026

Only Draw What The Map Says You Can See

PVS culling driven by the BSP's own compiled cluster graph, with a debug command that prints exactly how much it threw away.

SOURCEv0.8.7.md

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v0.8.8

RendererJanuary 4, 2026

What Carmack Said About Fog

Per-face fog detection from the BSP effects lump, and a note on why the obvious global-fog implementation does not work.

SOURCEv0.8.8.md

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v0.8.9

GameplayJanuary 4, 2026

A Door That Was In The Map The Whole Time

BSP entities routed through the same handler registry as .map files, func_door with inline brush models, and freefly collision against clip brushes.

SOURCEv0.8.9.md

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v0.8.10

RendererJanuary 5, 2026

One Mesh, One Lightmap

Mesh grouping rebuilt around texture-plus-lightmap pairs, autosprite and autosprite2 billboards, and thirteen render variables you can type.

Half the Engine Thrown Away

Granular Babylon.js imports cut the bundle by 5.8MB, plus a dedicated shader material for Quake's filter blend decals.

SOURCEv0.8.12.md

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v0.8.13

RendererJanuary 7, 2026

A Sky For Maps That Only Have One Texture

Textured skybox fallbacks, sky spheres instead of cubes for single-texture skies, and sky textures read from PK3 data instead of a URL.

Forty-Five Manual Pages

A VitePress manual with beginner, intermediate and advanced tutorials, tab autocomplete in the console, and an honest sentence about what 'idTech3 support' means.

SOURCEv0.8.14.md

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v0.8.15

EngineJanuary 9, 2026

Every Number In One Place

A typed cvar system with validation, bounds, change callbacks and localStorage persistence — and engine.json became mandatory.

SOURCEv0.8.15.md

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v0.8.16

EngineJanuary 9, 2026

The Game Became a Submodule

The game moved to src/games/default with build-time selection via a GAME env var, and the console got a colour scheme.

SOURCEv0.8.16.md

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v0.8.17

BuildJanuary 11, 2026

Two Problems, One Release

The console became 45 class files, Quake 3 clip-brush collision landed, and tree-shaking took the bundle from 8.0MB to 3.36MB.

SOURCEv0.8.17.md

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v0.8.19

MovementJanuary 15, 2026

The Engine Learned to Bunny Hop

Warsow movement constants ported from gs_pmove.c, a BSP lightgrid, a day/night cycle, and the first weapon view models with muzzle flashes.

SOURCEv0.8.19.md

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Gameplay

Movement Tech: Wall Jumps & Slides

Wall jumps with a charge window, ledge grabs that pull you up, and crouch slides with a real entry boost.

January 15, 2026Read

v0.8.20

MovementJanuary 19, 2026

Fifty-Six Units Tall

A rewritten Quake-style player bounding box, Havok WASM physics, an in-game map loading overlay, and a ledge grab that stopped firing on 45-degree ramps.

SOURCEv0.8.20.md

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v0.8.21

MovementJanuary 20, 2026

Sprint, Then Crouch

Crouchslide lands with a 425 speed gate, an 800ms duration, a 12-degree camera tilt, and swept triangle collision for bezier patches.

SOURCEv0.8.21.md

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v0.8.22

AnimationJanuary 24, 2026

Three Animations On Top Of Each Other

A layered animation blender with procedural recoil, landing and movement weights, plus the wall jump stop shaking.

SOURCEv0.8.22.md

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v0.8.23

MovementJanuary 27, 2026

Walking East On A Map That Thought You Were Going West

Inverted movement fixed, a fixed-timestep accumulator at 60Hz, three air-acceleration modes, and stair smoothing.

SOURCEv0.8.23.md

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v0.8.24

NetcodeJanuary 28, 2026

The Server Started Colliding

Sweep-based server-authoritative collision, plus a research pass on dedicated server architecture and a gametype API.

SOURCEv0.8.24.md

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v0.8.25

NetcodeJanuary 31, 2026

A Plan Written Down Before The Code

Server architecture v2 documented in full, TypeScript branded types for units, and an honest key-findings section about why client and server disagreed.

SOURCEv0.8.25.md

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Next: Multiplayer at 125 Hz