Here are three things that would be very good to have but are impossible due to OS and/or hardware constraints.
If these came true, they would benefit all computer games, not just Unvqanquished. The best target for these petitions is Microsoft IMO, since Microsoft cares about gaming, is the desktop market monopolist, can make these proposals into standards and enforce them with their vendor lock-in.
Allow players to create their own temporary servers easily. The most important one. There's already GUI for that, but the user must still open and forward the relevant ports manually. With the right modding system (when mod download also includes server code, sources for both client and server, so a player who played on a modded server once can create a game with that mod him/herself and modify the mod further, I think Unvanquished can already do that) this could encourage modding A LOT, since modders won't need to host 24/7 servers anymore. If the engine can be made to transfer the game state to another player when the host quits, playing on temporary servers would be nearly as seamless as playing on a 24/7 server (I guess it would be very hard to adapt the existing code for that though).
- Router, OS developers: Make it easy for normal PEOPLE to run servers (automatically and transparently handle port forwarding, firewall and stuff like that). Allow application to request port forwarding (with confirmation dialog, of course).
Allow games to have mouse sensitivity in degrees per centimeter, not in cryptic unitless numbers:
- Mouse developers: Mice should report their DPI to the OS.
- OS developers: Should allow getting mouse input without built-in mouse acceleration.
Allow games to have sane default keyboard bindings regardless of keybord layout:
- OS developers: Make a default binding API that should determine best keyboard layout for a set of actions using some arcane magic. Pseudocode in JavaScript:
Code: Select all
var resulst = getDefaultBindings({
genre: "firstPersonShooter",
actions: [
"attackPrimary",
"attackSecondary",
"medkit",
"reload",
"buyWeapon1",
"buyWeapon2",
{ name: "evolve", urgency: "medium" }
]});
Result: {
actions: {
"attackPrimary": "MOUSE1",
"attackSecondary": "MOUSE2",
"medkit": "CTRL",
"reload": "R",
"buyWeapon1": "1",
"buyWeapon2": "2",
"evolve": "q"
}
}Where everything but "evolve" is a pre-defined action (primary, secondary attacks, reload, medkit). The OS should guess an optimal layout.