If these came true, they would benefit all computer games, not just Red Eclipse. The best target for these petitions is Microsoft IMO, since Microsoft cares about gaming, is a 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. Some games already have GUI for that, but the user must still open and forward the relevant ports manually. 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:
- {l Code}: {l Select All Code}
var resulst = getDefaultBindings({
genre: "firstPersonShooter",
actions: [
"attackPrimary",
"attackSecondary",
"reload",
"weapon1",
"weapon2",
{ name: "evolve", urgency: "medium" }
]});
Result: {
actions: {
"attackPrimary": "MOUSE1",
"attackSecondary": "MOUSE2",
"reload": "R",
"weapon1": "1",
"weapon2": "2",
"evolve": "q"
}
}
Where everything but "evolve" (that's from Tremulous and is there just for an example of an action that's game-specific) is a pre-defined action (primary, secondary attacks, reload, medkit). The OS should guess an optimal layout.
