Architecture and Roadmap

Procedural Recipes are intended to become a consumer-neutral procedural kernel. The current Tile, Material, and SDF document types are the compatibility base for that evolution.

Architectural boundary

Recipe core
  parsing and validation
  deterministic fields and patterns
  colors and surface materials
  SDF coverage
  consumer-neutral render surfaces
              |
              +-- Tile / project adapter
              +-- Avatar wearable adapter
              +-- Avatar headgear adapter
              +-- future UI adapter
              +-- future paint and stamp adapters
              +-- future geometry adapter

The core must not depend on Avatar, UI, map, ruleset, or renderer-specific entity types. A consumer supplies dimensions, coordinate mapping, seed, time, palette, and any semantic masks. It then converts the typed result into its own representation.

Ownership

• A recipe owns procedural visual logic and named outputs.
• A Material owns reusable surface appearance.
• An SDF owns reusable coverage or silhouette.
• A consumer binding owns context such as equipment channels, map placement, widget state, or target dimensions.
• A ruleset or item owns gameplay meaning.

For example, a helmet item owns its head slot and armor value, its SDF owns the silhouette, its Material owns the hammered-metal appearance, and the Avatar adapter owns fitting those assets to each frame.

Stability policy

New work should preserve existing Tile and Material documents. Shared primitives should be generalized underneath those documents rather than replacing their syntax prematurely.

When a new consumer is added:

1. define the small typed output contract it needs;
2. define the coordinate and seed context it supplies;
3. reuse existing recipe outputs where possible;
4. keep consumer-specific metadata outside the recipe;
5. add deterministic previews and cache signatures;
6. document whether the binding is stable or experimental.

Planned directions

These are design goals, not currently supported authoring contracts:

• richer shared SDF primitives, transforms, repetition, and smooth operations;
• canonical Avatar part coordinates and optional authored UV guides;
• recipe-driven buttons, panels, borders, and icons with UI state inputs;
• procedural brushes and stamps using shared coverage and materials;
• particle-emitter outputs;
• consumer-neutral geometry output with extrusion and placement adapters;
• complete recipe-authored Avatar parts while retaining current atlases;
• a visual Recipe editor backed by the same canonical text format.

The guiding constraint is that a feature should strengthen the shared procedural vocabulary. It should not create another isolated procedural subsystem that only one Eldiron tool can understand.