Forking Intersect Engine: What would you change, add, or remove? Let's talk!

[amissus0]

Hey everyone,

 

I’m currently working on my own heavily modified fork of the Intersect Engine, tailored specifically for an upcoming game project. Before I dive headfirst into building the actual game content, I want to make sure the engine's foundation is as solid, modern, and feature-rich as possible.

 

Since many of you have spent countless hours working with Intersect, I want to ask the community directly:

• What should be changed?
• What absolutely needs to be added?
• What should be completely removed?

 

To give you an idea of where the project is at, I’ve already spent a lot of time gutting the legacy tech debt and modernizing the core architecture.

Here is what’s already done (Under the hood):

1. Tech Stack Upgrade: Migrated the entire technical base to .NET 10. Cleaned up the solution, centralized package management, and established formal architectural rules, ADRs, and a modernization roadmap.
2. Runtime Stability: Stabilized the new runtime on MonoGame 3.8.4.1, complete with compatibility policies, validation reports, and controlled rollbacks.
3. New Core Layers: Introduced Advenae.Shared and Advenae.Protocol layers. Instead of spilling logic all over the old Intersect modules, these handle shared contracts, versioning, compatibility, diagnostics, and localization.
4. Robust Updater System: Built Advenae.Updater from scratch featuring update manifests, release channels, deterministic packages, artifact hashing, rollback metadata, and execution handoff contracts.
5. Security & Identity: Implemented a brand-new security layer with roles, permissions, account/session descriptors, token policies, rate limiting, and dynamic session refreshing based on permission changes.
6. Server Architecture: Expanded the server model to include realm identity, environment statuses, registry visibility, access modes, and strict separation of public vs. operator data. This completely paves the way for a true multi-realm setup.
7. Data Persistence: Added a much safer persistence layer—schema state catalogs, compatibility startup gates, pre-migration backup snapshots, and data state classifications (clean, partial, or broken).
8. Client Startup & Updates: Rebuilt the client boot layer. It now supports multi-realm detection, localized operational messages (EN and PL bundles ready), update intent exports, and validated success markers. Host-side updates now have full restart plans, retry/rollback loops, and strict completion verification.
9. CI/CD & Testing: Set up a controlled release pipeline with repo-root CI/CD, Advenae.ReleaseTooling, staged release evidence, promotion records, and strict gates before publication. Expanded test coverage heavily (Advenae.Contracts.Tests, Advenae.Updater.Tests).
10. The Purge: Removed a ton of unnecessary legacy bloat, including the old Intersect Character Generator.exe, leftover certs, loose runtime files, and unused auth dependencies (like stripping Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer from the active server surface).

 

My Immediate Roadmap (What I’m planning to do next):

1. A Brand New Editor: Scrapping the old one and building a totally new, responsive editor powered by the Avalonia UI framework. It will be designed specifically for managing massive worlds efficiently and will act as a unified hub (World Editor, UI Editor, Updater Editor, and Server Editor).
2. Direct Server Connections: Allowing the client to connect directly to other servers.
3. Master Server + World Servers Architecture: True multi-server support. Planning to introduce premium features, premium items, etc., globally.
4. Web-Based Admin/Mod Panel: A completely new, fast, and user-friendly web app for community management, so admins don't have to rely on clunky in-game tools.
5. Graphics & Shaders: Adding several custom shaders, better global lighting, and overall new graphics options (including proper support for larger monitors/resolutions).
6. Cinematic Camera Control: The ability to manipulate the camera via events. (e.g., You discover some ancient ruins, and an event temporarily zooms the camera out to show the landscape).
7. Event System Overhaul: More event capabilities, better organization, and improved logic flow.
8. 8-Directional Movement: Adding full 8-way movement (with the option to toggle it off for classic 4-way games).
9. General Polish: More VFX, massive improvements to spells, weapons, and combat feel.
10. Economy Overhaul: An advanced currency system featuring currency stacking, defined values, and integrated premium currencies.

 

I’m building this engine to scale, but I’d love to hear your thoughts. What are your biggest pain points with vanilla Intersect? Drop your suggestions below!

[eins]

I'd question: Why a fork?

The right way would always be to commit these upgrades and fixes to the upstream. If they don't get accepted for some reason, you're open to create your own fork. If you immediately fork and don't contribute back to the project that just leads to fragmentation. You should at least try to keep the Upstream as close as possible to your project, so you can also benefit from contributions to the original project.

In the Linux world that concept is called "Upstream first".