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Cool ideas for the future

Here are some cool ideas which may or may not get implemented some day
Feel free to add your own ideas here.

• Gameplay
  • Physics - at least to some extent. E.g. when a missile hits helicopter which is in the air, but not moving, and helicopter is blown up then some pieces of it should fly to the direction opposite to the missile's direction.
    Also, it'd be cool if big explosions (really big explosions) could push tanks and other small items around a bit. Or maybe disable them or throw small things into the air...
  • Terrain deformation - terrain height is change in real-time, e.g. when big bomb is detonated.
    We'd need to recalc normals for changed corners and possibly some pathfinding stuff, too.
  • Accuracy for weapons - would be great for units to add realism.
  • Morale - so that units have some will of their own and perhaps won't always do what you order them to do.
    E.g. if lots of units in a group get killed, it lowers the morale of the group, so the group might eventually flee from the battle.
  • Soldier-based gameplay - means that there are two types of units: soldiers and vehicles.
    Soldiers are the ones that can move themselves, vehicles need soldiers (crew) to be able to move and/or shoot.
    This would also allow for some new tactics, e.g. you could kill the crew of a vehicle and take over the vehicle and use it against it's former owner.
  • Scripting - allow the user to use and add to a library of scripts which can be applied to different units or groups, such as "escort" or "beach landing".
  • See Strategic Project
  • Cutting edge weapons - Gauss rifles, rail guns, EMP bombs ,missile launchers with long range ... Maybe limited. Think of Warhammer 40k.
• Graphics
  • Water reflects the map and all the objects on it, i.e. real reflections.
    We need RTT and fragment shaders for this (DX9 class card).
  • HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering - it's probably too slow though, unless we can speed up 3d engine a lot somehow.
    HDR would enable e.g. light blooms.
    Thinking twice, maybe it's not so slow, because the scene would still be rendered just once. We'd just render to texture and blur high-intensity parts of it and do some tone-mapping.
    Bigger problem might be that for true HDR, we might need all materials and textures to be changed (to work correctly with HDR).
  • Image-based effects such as heat haze effect (cool around fires) or blur effect (around explosions?).
  • Decals!!! - we NEED decals for terrain.
    This would make sooo many useful and necessary things possible, e.g. big cursors that follow terrain's shape, effect decals (e.g. dark spot when there's an explosion), maybe simple shadows, etc...
  • Multi-Screen GUI - Most games assume the User has only got one screen, but GPUs with dual VGA/DVI ports don't cost much and you can get a 17" CRT for about nothing. The idea is to completely move the HUD to a second screen if there is one available.
• Multiplayer
  • Teamplay - Most strategy games follow the same principle: Every player has his own base, units and buildings. Players may team up somehow but usually this approach doesn't go very deep. Most of the time the player is also busy switching between his units and the base so there's not much time for strategical moves. There should be a multiplayer mode where players team up to form "real" parties. One player for every party is declared to be the "Commander" and is equipped with all "rights". Other players may have rights to move units, create buildings, use the Radar etc. Like that it is possible to create very very big scenarios and it is finally possible to do some _real_ strategy (one team member preapres for an attack while another helps him by monitoring enemy moves on the radar, the commander just built an Airport to equip the Radar guy with some new Spy Drones etc.). Together with the Multi-Screen idea from above this would probably give a really deep multiplayer experience.