[SUGGESTION] Idea: The Great Petitions

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 Xonotic. 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. 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 Xonotic 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:

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.

- 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).

Already there, it's called UPnP. There might be sometimes some security issues with this though. It all comes down to the user not being an idiot which isn't easy.

BTW: the whole hosting "problem" would be a lot less of an issue if we already had IPv6.

Already there, it's called UPnP. There might be sometimes some security issues with this though. It all comes down to the user not being an idiot which isn't easy.

Does it require non-trivival additional setup? Making servers from behind routers should ideally work like magic, by default, with no setup at all, at least on home routers.

BTW: the whole hosting "problem" would be a lot less of an issue if we already had IPv6.

What about another petition?