If you're a BYOND Member you get to vote on which features you'd like to see added. It's not an entirely democratic process, it just gives the BYOND staff a good idea of what the community wants. The problem with this is some people might not be entirely sure about what they're voting for and end up inadvertently burring great feature requests under ones which seem nice but aren't very practical or feasible.
What I'm going to do is list off a few of the popular features and give my opinions on them. I'm also going to point out a few lesser known feature requests to hopefully give them some support.
Popular Feature Requests
BYOND uses a very server-focused method of hosting. When playing a BYOND game over the internet the sever does all the calculations and sends the info to the players' game clients. For the most part this works out just fine but, this also means game resources (changing your hair color, rotating projectiles, etc) are created server-side and sent to the client. This uses up a lot of bandwidth and makes the game lag.Pixel Movement
What this feature is asking for is a way to offload some of the burden of icon operations from the server onto the client. If the server only had to send instructions for generating icons rather than the icons themselves network lag would decrease dramatically during icon operations. This feature is definitely worth the votes.
Pixel movement is a method of collision detection which doesn't rely exclusively on tile-based coordinates. Basically, when you take a step you move a few pixels rather than a whole 32x32 tile.Selectively Hiding Objects from Players
It's a feature which sounds great but isn't quite as simple to implement as you'd think. There are many ways BYOND could add native pixel movement but, there's no uniform method of collision detection which would benefit every single game using it. BYOND already has the tools necessary to make your own form of pixel movement just the way you want it and with Forum_account's extremely polished pixel movement library I think it would be a waste of time to focus on adding this.
What this feature is asking for can be summed up as a much more versatile invisibility variable. Invisibility works in a linear fashion right now, atoms can be more invisible or less invisible than other atoms. If you want to see the more invisible atoms you also see the less invisible atoms. There's no way to break the invisible atoms into different groups where you can see one set of invisible atoms without seeing the other set. That's what this feature is asking for.Get DD Hosted Mode
There are all sorts of uses for this feature. A few examples I can think of are making instances a whole lot simpler to create. Survival/Horror games would be able to have many different new traps and puzzles. The elevation in my own game Decadence would become an obsolete thing of the past. Pretty much everything about this feature request is positive and I'd like to see it added.
This is one of those features which may seem pointless but would actually save developers from a lot of headaches. BYOND has three security modes: trusted/safe/ultrasafe. This is to prevent people from turning a BYOND game into a keylogger, trojan, or some other nasty thing. The drawback is normal developers have to jump through security checks in order to have simple server logs, player saves, and so on.
When starting up a game things can look pretty messed up depending on your security settings. What this feature is asking for is a way to actually check what the security settings are so developers can set up contingency plans to deal with not having read/write access. I would really like to see this added.
Not So Popular Feature Requests
When developing a multiplayer BYOND game a normal part of the testing process is logging into the game with a whole bunch of different accounts and testing out all the game's mechanics until something breaks. This process can be bogged down by the fact you have to log in and out of all those accounts just to connect to the game with them in the first place.Macros solely for Shift, Ctrl, and Alt.
This feature is essentially asking for a way to log into a game a bunch of times without having to change accounts. It would make testing a lot easier and quicker. I'm the one who submitted the request, so obviously I would like to see it added.
This one's a no-brainer. BYOND doesn't support macros for just shift, ctrl, and alt. They're modifier keys for commands like Ctrl+F. We aren't able to use ctrl on its own as a crouch button just like you would find in most FPS games.Map Resolution stretching alternative to AA
Having the ability to use ctrl, alt, and shift as macro keys would improve the gameplay experience in a lot of games which require rapid user input. Modern games use WASD controls with the pinky on ctrl and the thumb on space bar. Not being able to use layouts like this only serves to promote the use of awkward control schemes.
When stretching game windows icons lose their crisp image quality and become blurry.This feature request is asking for a way to change the behavior of this resizing.ping(Address)
It's a much needed feature but, I'd like for the BYOND staff to really sit down and give this particular area a complete overhaul. Your average SNES emulator has all sorts of view filters; nearest neighbor interpolation, grayscale, scanlines, you name it. I would really like to see these things added.
Pinging something is a way of measuring network latency. It's how you tell when someone's connection has gone bad. BYOND has a few methods for measuring network latency but, none of them are reliable and accurate enough for normal use.
This feature request is asking for a simple built-in procedure for having a server ping an IP address. Being the one who submitted the request, it's safe to say I'd be happy to see it made so.
