Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about coding, what it entails, costs, how much works has to be done, or if it is even possible without changing the game completely. However, here are some of my new ideas for the server (Please comment on the possibility, impossibility, or if the idea is okay):
Some nice ideas here, some of them have been covered already. Here's a bit of info.
Implement a full-time chat in game. At the moment, when we type in game, our chat disappears over time. It would be nice to have a permanent chat log that we could toggle on and off in game to reference what a friend or partner said.
This is an interesting idea. I think at the moment, in game chat is hard-coded to expire after 7 seconds on screen. IIRC its not hard to adjust that time to make it stay visible for longer.
Wouldn't be too difficult to log it to a text file, for example. Although that would be quite easy to edit so it wouldn't be "evidence" or whatever.
Fixing hosting issues/forwarding ports. I'm beating a dead horse here, but fixing this would lead to an exponential amount of people returning to the server and/or staying more involved in the game longer. The fact that many people don't have access to their routers, or forward their ports correctly and still have issues is one of the primary reasons Warcraft 2 lacks growth and is slowly fading.
Yeah this needs doing. Been discussed enough lately.
If we can come up with ~$3,000 in cash annually for tournaments from just from a handful of hosts, surely we can come up with much more than that from many people to give some thoughtful and meaningful upgrades to the server.
The server is pretty laggy. Finding regular reboots or something to fix this would be great. People conflict in games all of the time depending on who hosts the game. I'm not sure if there is a way around this.
The server is not laggy, its great.
In-game lag/conflict has absolutely nothing to do with the server. WC2 games are 100% peer-to-peer the server is not involved.
There's a complete description of this topic
HERE.
Some sort of built in lag or latency repellent. It's crazy that I can play a complex high volume game like League of Legends without any lag, but can barely play Warcraft 2 without it lagging every 10 seconds.
Yes. WC2 was a pioneer in many respects. When people write modern games they are taking into accout the lessons learned from early games.
These days when somebody has a slow connection, thats on them - modern games allow for people, in effect "missing their turn" and allow the people with better connections to continue without them.
WC2 was written to demand communication from every player, every time. So if one player has a slow connection to any other player in the game, then the game lags for everyone, and a particularly bad connection between 2 individual players manifests as a "conflict".
Unfortunately fixing this would require entirely re-writing the way WC2 functions over a network .... pretty much re-writing the entire multiplayer part of the game fron the ground up.
Having more color schemes (like black to pink).
You can do this to some extent with my
palette editor, although as WC2 uses 8-bit graphics you are limited to a maximum of 256 different color being displayed at any one time.
Making it possible to have more than 8 player games (like 12 players, or 8 players and 4 watchers).
Create new races using Starcraft or Warcraft 3 as a template.
Upgrade graphics to higher DPI/resolution. (remastering)
Resource sharing amongst partners or anyone in game. An example of this would be Age of Empires or Warcraft 3.
Create new units/buildings. Why can't we make demons? Or why can't we think of new units to make the game more versatile?
Good luck
There's been lots of discussion about these things, none of them are very likely. I have ideas about making a new front-end that would allow bigger resolution game-screens and possibly watchers also, but that is a lot of work and im sure not doing it this week lol.
Making demons *might* be possible with exe mods (see below).
More than 8 players, res-sharing and new races/units/buildings are just not possible without re-writing the entire game.
Make humans more even to orcs. Healing is impractical and most people stop at knights. Either having a blacksmith upgrade to level 6 or 7 to make them stronger and equal to lust, or having their own version of lust would be great.
Lots of people have ideas about this sort of stuff. Many of them are quite achievable by modding the exe. The thing is that all players in any game must have the same exe mods or people will just instantly drop. My LiveMod project was one possible way to achieve this. It worked by including a custom section in PUD files that had the mods for that map in it and was the patched into the exe in memory when the game started. In theory it works, but needs more development, and also the individual mods need to be developed and stable.
Getting warcraft 2 on more platforms. I know mousey and others worked on that once but that fell through.
The problem here is that we dont have the WC2 source code, Blizzard owns it and they're not sharing. So it's not a case of porting the code to a different platform, we have to get the Windows (or even Mac!) code to run on a different platform. This pretty much makes the only option some sort of virtual environment, i.e. DOSBox or a VM etc.
Put the Windows 10 fix within the download. I still can't figure out ddraw. Virtually everyone plays with Windows 10 and experiences the overlays from resolution problems.
Implementing Warcraft 2 music in next patch.
Fix the ladder system so that Elo is the ladder determinent, not by beating someone from a higher # and cut it in half. I am currently ranked #6 with an Elo of 1436. Yet someone who is much better than me is ranked like #40 with 1750 elo. Elo = ladder = higher skill. I should be ranked #100.
This sort of thing is up to iL to include, if he wants. AFAIK the music and ddraw aren't hard to include. A new ladder system would required some work but is achievable, but you would have to ask him about that stuff.
Advertising the crap out of this game. It's still better than most modern games I play.
I agree. In fact several people HAVE put a lot of work into advertizing the game lately. IMHO the biggest problem is that when new people check it out they often find a bunch of surley, abusive, arrogant wankers who just call them noob trash and ban them from games.
