Rapid Plans- second half of 2022

[Bonkles]

Hello all,
As we mentioned in our announcement discussion, we're hot on the trail implementing a new v2 renderer in webGL. This has taken up the overwhelming majority of our dev work for the first half of 2022- now we'd like to chat a bit about what's up for the rest of the year.

Here's a pretty picture:

What to expect in the v2 release

• A Screamingly fast >30 fps renderer
• Almost no visual difference from v1 (>95% of features should be near pixel-for-pixel reproductions)
• Near (>95%) feature parity with v1

Since we're taking the time to rewrite the entire rendering stack to be as performant as possible. This means that 'almost no difference from v1' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. it is going to take a lot of work to prove that the GL version is working correctly across the entire breadth of interactions that our users require.

It's just gonna be LOTS FASTER. Like, expect an order of magnitude (or more) performance upgrade for FPS and map responsiveness.

This doesn't mean that there are NO new features in the renderer at all- @bhousel has put a lot of nice features into the renderer, like improving our labelling, progressive enhancement of shapes on zoom-in, the concept of 'effective zoom', and more!

How's it compare, looks wise?

Check out this side-by-side comparison shot that I chose completely at random. This shows v1 RapiD on the left, with v2 on the right:

There are a few subtle differences if you really look, but we think that the feature reproduction is more than good enough as the code stands right now.

Notable omissions for v2 launch functionality:

• Turn-by-turn directions editor
• The Intro/Tutorial walkthrough

What does this mean for feature requests?

Enhancement requests, requests for new features, etc. will all almost certainly be deferred till 2023.

Notable milestones

1. Feature-complete development date (End of July)
2. QA Entrance (Beginning of August)
3. Public Beta (September)
4. Bug smashing phase as we address feedback from QA/Beta Participants (October)
5. v2 Release (November)
6. v1 Retirement (December)

I'm extremely excited to get v2 shipped. There will be more discussions here on how we structure our beta testing, solicit feedback, and more. In the coming weeks we'll have a post detailing our plans for 2023 and beyond.

[Bonkles]

Since we wrote this post, we're amending our schedule a bit here.

We will release a new alpha version sometime in November, followed up with an extended Beta in December. Stay tuned!