- Bring back 4 player split screen
I’m not confused by this from unit economics, but with high definition screens and more powerful graphics processing units, this should be easier than ever.
It’s also societally sort of a shame, because children, teens, and young adults don’t get to experience couch multiplayer very much anymore outside of Nintendo’s ecosystem, predominantly. - Establish a de facto C library for client-side prediction, reconciliation, interpolation, payload serialization and deserialization, and payload event handling
Multiplayer is very bad in 2023, and it has been for many years. There are few game engine engineers who understand how to do this well, and it’s a ripe area for an open source client to step back in now that previous solutions are no longer viable.
- Give players back the ability to create community servers and make this the default behavior
Note that at the time of writing, user run listen and dedicated servers are called “community servers,” but in the past, this had no name because official and matchmaking servers did not exist.
- Evangelize the QSpy/GameSpy/Valve Master Server List protocol as the de facto server browser protocol
By spreading the knowledge down to indie game developers that the industry has had a way to do this for decades, together we can make one portion of game development easier for everyone, and allow new software to flourish around an agreed upon protocol.
- Emphasize the development of game engines with external tools that respond to asset changes, rather than fully-integrated environments
Game engines are now mostly editor based, but these game engine ecosystems are highly siloed because internal details aren’t widely utilized to create competing utilities and tools.
What we lose by doing this is development flexibility and we allow engine ecosystems to create walled gardens that make interoperability more difficult.
- Emphasize game engine architecture that allows for mods, instead of promoting highly limited user-generated content rails that content creators cannot breakout of
There’s more to content creation than hats and skins, and because we don’t promote this more in the industry, there are fewer contemporary examples of modders becoming professionals and establishing new intellectual property based on proven successful new games built upon the shoulders of developers who provided their tools to others.
- Create a Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 with module extensions user-interface library for game developers and artists to create next generation user interfaces
I’m mixed on this, and such an invention would have more widespread influence than just on game development. We shouldn’t be integrating all of Chromium through CEF to do this, but if you have it, then you have an entire web browser through which you can do more.
But most of the time, I just want to have the box model as defined in CSS 2.1 to create UI trees. From there, you can add HTML if you wanted to create the actual UI trees, and CSS files to define the styles. You wouldn’t necessarily need an entire JavaScript implementation if you’re already performing game logic in the host language, but you would necessarily lose integration with the entire JavaScript ecosystem as it exists today (Web, Node.js, et al.) or you would be creating an entirely new environment (Game).
Changes I Would Like To See in Game Development and Industry
by
Tags:
Leave a Reply