A place to kickstart our ideas. To cumulate, solidify our reoccurring or outstanding thoughts and bounce them from one another. The ideas might be as small and specific or as broad and general as you want. Keep things loose.
(This page may be split as needed.)

Overview

Proposed method of interaction

One sentence description

Explanation of exact problem to be solved with a simple outline what the solution would be. [PersonProposing]

comment [Person1]
- response to comment [PersonProposing]
- comment 2 [Person2]
request for comment [PersonProposing]
- response [Person3]
- response [Person2]
  - another response [PeronProposing]
    - another another response [Person2]
      - another x3 response [PersonProposing]
        
        another x4 response [Person2]
        
        a comment [Person3]
    - response to Person3 response to PersonProposing RFC [Person1]

Once an idea with it's commentary reaches over 25 lines in total splitting and linking it here should be considered to keep page usable.
If idea gets implemented archiving probably is in order.

Ideas

General Project

TODO

Servers & Administration

highscore system

Highscore experimentation on map&bot testing could include the amount of attempts a scenario was tried since last highscore, to give a (biased) hint at difficulty and popularity. [bmorel]

free-style servers

Akin to what red-eclipse 1.x had, and that 2.x likely still have: a server owner should be able to configure an instance to allow authorized players to alter gameplay however they want, until some event happen (in RE 1.6, it was: until end of current map, until server is empty, or permanent, I think). [bmorel]

admin, communication and community mechanics

I would like to have support for a clan system, which would more or less be about allowing some players to create a clan, and to be then allowed to invite players in their clan. This 2nd step requires players to be able to accept, refuse or blacklist such invitations, and all this would likely require some GUI. Ideally those clans should be shared through servers, but we should be able to only sync the membership part, so that a clan may have all its members allowed to do some actions without sharing it on other servers. As a first step, a per-server-only solution would be neat. [bmorel]

Murmur communication. This does not necessarily modifying game's nor engine's code, it could be done by sniffing logs and sending ICE queries. It could notably allow things like:
1. automatically move mumble users in channels depending on their team or clan;
2. allow a mumble user with a 2nd monitor to receive unv's chatter in mumble, as well
Related links:
1. https://www.mumble.info/documentation/mumble-server/scripting/
2. https://www.mumble.info/documentation/slice/1.3.0/html/Murmur/Server.html#setState [bmorel]

map rotations

I think it would be useful to implement map rotations in lua, instead of the current NiH dedicated lang. This could possibly allow to just pick completely random map from the pool, and even to weight such randomness by the last time played, and other info. [bmorel]

make target_force_win map-entities log win context, which could then be used by map rotatoin system to trigger a specific next map. This could allow for some kind of "gran strategy" games or (solo or multi) campaigns. This probably requires some preliminary groundwork, though. [bmorel]

Gameplay

Alien cover structure

Aliens are deeply disadvantaged in open spaces. Maybe they need a structure that could generate a better cover. Like a mist generator. [Redsky]

I disagree. Human's unlocked weapons all travel slowly, and advanced Dragoons can easily evade those. [bmorel]

Growing alien structures

Graphics jarringly misrepresents game logic state when alien structures are placed, often blocking paths or shots and causing unneeded frustration. Asymmetric teams solution would be to make bounding box scale to match graphics. Gives a mechanic of working as elevator for grangers/tyrants. [Redsky]

Shrinking/growing bboxes should be doable fairly easily, though I'd be in favour of a more extensive overhaul there, what's currently there sucks and is unintuitive in places. [Reaper]
- It would be simpler and more coherent imo to do something akin to how human building's construction work: a shader. Not a ghostly one of course, perhaps could reuse the old tremulous egg to provide some sort of shell that would then explode like a cocoon to show the final building? If buildings start to act as an elevator, this would open the room to many hacks, and aliens already can exploit the devolve feature to gain early access to places unreachable without jetpack, which is definitely unfair (in a theoretical PvP). [bmorel]

Wall-walking on structures

Falling off from wall, because you dared to step onto a hive is a pain. [Redsky]

core problem here is, as always, AABB. Buildings are represented as those, and while implementing WW on structures (or players! I would love this!) would not be hard, it would definitely look ugly [bmorel]

Movement should accommodate complex geometry

Instead of relying on mappers making details not clipping or covering things in playerclip brushes (and ruining emersion when building floating structures) movement system should be more forgiving. I.E. less like like a sliding box and more semi-sentient creature. [Redsky]

Probably want to do something like mesh decimation and use the resulting geometry for ww. Would also be useful for better minimaps. [Reaper]

make alien structures poisonous

When a booster is nearby, alien structures could inflict poison. The feature is simple to be kept optional. Patch already exists. [bmorel]

+1. From testing at freem's: very interesting mechanic that could be expanded upon with different ways of transferring poison and healing factor. Shows a way to strengthen alien structures by giving them ways to support each other. Poisonous structures need to be obvious to player (e.g. different skins). [Redsky]
- poisonous aliens are not obvious to players, so I don't think this is a critical consideration. But ideally, yes, there should be a visual hint. This is outside of my skill range though. [bmorel]

More gore

Overkill is fun. For example: if body reaches -100% hp it should gib. If it reaches -200% hp it should turn to bloody mist. [Redsky]

Overkill for stuctures

I would see overkill for buildables: keeping attacking a building, or having a strong enough final blow, would allow to just make it disappear, possibly with immediate explosion (not nice for tyrants, but this can be arranged later). This would make attacking human bases as alien a lot less frustrating, as those 5s delays before relatively strong explosions (starts with 100 for human defenses, a lot for aliens) are pretty annoying. [bmorel]

Priority spawn

When performing critical manoeuvre or just splitting into teams it would very helpful upon dying not to respawn halfway across the map just because there was a specially closer spawn or there was a queue. Getting all your progress destroyed and you sub-squad demoralized and disorganised is no fun. [Redsky]

Multiple options that have been suggested: choosing spawn point on the map, i. e. enlarged version of the minimap (ideally we'd want a 3d minimap for that, + maybe a list of spawns on the side with cooldowns and their spawn queues); selecting a spawn (press use on it or something and it'll be highlighted as your spawn); using last seen spawn within x qu distance (with a checkmark on the spawn screen to use that or the current behaviour); being able to teleport between spawns - works well thematically for telenodes (perhaps require credits or induce cooldown on both nodes), for aliens we might want to kill the player and respawn them at the other egg (maybe use some evos if the player is a dretch/granger); use navmeshes to find closest spawn by distance walked (doesn't work for cases where you need to jetpsck/jump/etc.) [Reaper]
The traditional rules are: for each player, there is a point in space. The player spawns at the closest free egg/telenode. With traditional rules, this point in space is the place where the player last died. I have a PvE extension that selects an arbitray point in space for a whole team instead. This is used to make bots spawn at the other side of the map if the users attack there. This could easily be changed to selecting an arbitrary point in space for each player. Combined with spawn teleporting, this might be good enough. [Sweet]
Fascinating. So it is an arbitrary point in space. I propose then that we make it manageable by players themselves, settable like currently beacons are. Given that if we could marry it with another idea from this list: beacon anchors we would be able to set these personal tele "beacons" across corners of the map. [Redsky]
Let us try this: you aim at a building's beacon, and press some button to select this as your preferred spawn location. That sets your preferred point in space to the beacon's position. This works through walls. I am currently using the command luarocket spawnAtBeacon() for this selection, which should be bound to button m. [Sweet]

Sieging Drills

Reuse drilling structure for sieging campers. After building in vicinity of enemy base a countdown starts after which it either causes progressive shutdown of enemy structures or their destruction. [Redsky]

Scaling BB to fit wall structures

It appears that bounding box of structures doesn't fit it's model when placed on the wall. When placed on vertical wall BB width and hight should be switch places. When placed on other non-vertical surfaces they should be scaled appropriately. [Redsky]

There is code that's trying to do that, but it's clearly broken. For sloped surfaces we'd need OBBs, which isn't particularly difficult, but like I said I'd be in favour of a major overhaul there. [Reaper]
- To handle this, we indeed need to be able to refine collisions after the main collision is detected. The current codebase is unable to do things we need, because we really have only 3 number we can adjust: height-over-origin, height-below-origin, and half-extent. Old tremulous models I have seen seem to have been built with those technical limitations of the engine in mind, but not unvanquished's. [bmorel]

Warring structures

Makes no sense why would structures not fire upon each other. Especially since alien structures are just as degraded version of playable units. [Redsky]

User Interface

Aesthetic matching the team

Why do I, as alien organism, see enemies as clean hexes/rhombuses with crisp text lines like I'm using human HUD. [Redsky]

Buyable loadouts

Humans don't need to be fishing for each piece of equipment in heat of the moment. Better that they set up loadouts that they can easily buy. Especially autosaved most recent one. [Redsky]

Doable, probably easiest with lua. Rml would be the pain in the ass there. [Reaper]
html+css is the standard for UI these days anywhere. Rmlui is minimal, but OK. The biggest pain point for me as a user is it's the precarious way it's plugged into game logic.
I'll slap together a prototype and we'll see what's next. [Redsky]

Collapsible beacons

To avoid structure beacons spamming the whole screen show only 'camp' beacons that fade in details (i.e. known structures in a camp) when focused on. [Redsky]

There's also some code that fades beacons, but it's commented out. [Reaper]

Comms window

Either overlay and a popup window (when pressing Y/T/U) or a mode for console that allows to only display all chat/team chat, preferably with UI toggle to hide/show non-chat messages. Discarding parts of log like we can do obituaries is not acceptable workaround, keeping chat messages on screen longer would be a better. [Redsky]

Dynamic Buy/Morph UI

Buy menu/morph menu should respond to events such as changes in resources, momentum and closeness to OM/Arm. [Redsky]

Existing structure beacons as anchors

Having to stand in clear view of structure that you want others to target/defend/move makes it hard to cooperate with your teammate. We should be able to mark existing structures with attack/defend/etc beacons by focusing on them. This way you can tell the team where have you seen that egg or reactor after respawn, or which structures you're about to target rush. [Redsky]

Gyro indicator

When wall-walking you might get disorientated due to lack of clear visual cues. This indicator will tell you which way is down. [Redsky]

Moddable UI

Freem is right, user should be able to decide however he wants his UI to look like. Let all .dpks that only have ui/ directory be permissible. [Redsky]

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