I've been working on an engine for awhile and was wondering what features developers would want that have never been implemented. These aren't just things that don't exist at all, just things that haven't been put in a publicly available engine yet.

For me I would like:

• A framework for creating procedural environments. Where you can define important parts and have the rest filled in automatically.
• Collaborative map editor
• Dynamic sound

What would you like?

There are already many procedural world generators for Unity, so that's over-done.

Collaborative map editing can be done by sharing your screen, so that is done. We do that all the time when working with remote people.

What do you mean by dynamic sound? Something like DirectMusic offered a few years back, and the marketplace rejected because procedural music stinks for anything but the simplest ambient music? Or something else?

There are very few 'must have' missing features in the big engines like Unity or C4. They have had a lot of people working on them for several years, and missing features have been contributed by the community.

Unity could improve on the 'edit and continue' integration with Visual Studio, I suppose. That would be nice.

How would one know what all the features in all publicly available engines are? Has someone made a feature comparison chart of this kind of thing? That would be a handy object.

Cross platform shaders is still an open problem and a highly demanded one. Personally, I would like to see proposed solution #2 (a shading language that outputs hlsl & glsl) becoming popular, but proposed solution #3 & #4 also works (#4 looks interesting).

What do you mean by dynamic sound?

One of the best I've seen was a water flow soundscape generated by a real-time SPH particle system, reproducing sounds of trickling water, glugs of tipping a bucket in a pond, or beach waves. There's also a few demos showing different kinds of materials hitting and scraping against each other, which are convincing for some situations, but poor in others.

I think trespasser is the only game that's tried to use this kind of tech.

The catch is that about every single possible feature we can think of(to an extent) has been implemented in some engine. There is NO engine that has all the features, and some features are more rare than others, at least out of the box. Destructible terrain is a big one. I think it is C4 that has it, and no other engine as far as I know(at least of the big names) has it. With UDK, it is supposed to be impossible, though with the source licence(Unreal 3) it is much more possible. Unity doesn't directly support it, though they give access to a low enough level that it has been made possible, but not by default, rather coded in. Unity just recently (4 beta) allowed a normal mapped shader to apply to terrains(as in the internal splat-map terrain) without having write a special shader on your own, while UDK already had that one. Other engines may or may not have it. Animation systems are similar, while UDK has had IK for a time already, Unity "relatively" recently got it with the addition of the Mechanim animation system. Most other engines don't have IK at all.

Those aren't the only examples. Like I said, at least to this point, there is no engine that has every single feature yet, although almost every single feature has been implemented in SOME engine.

I want the engine to ship with the game I was intending on creating already finished, so I just need to call 'RunGame()'. I am pretty tired of implementing that part over and over, and feel it really should be a standard feature.

Collaborative map editing can be done by sharing your screen, so that is done. We do that all the time when working with remote people.

What I mean is that you could have people working on different parts of a map at the same time.

Cross platform shaders is still an open problem and a highly demanded one. Personally, I would like to see proposed solution #2 (a shading language that outputs hlsl & glsl) becoming popular, but proposed solution #3 & #4 also works (#4 looks interesting).

I didn't know about how much of a problem this was, I figured everything could use GLSL. I'm going to look into this.

Oooh, how about a "verify" button at the end of the project with several checkboxes like "Includes sufficient Fantasy tropes?" or "Is artsy enough?"

(joke aside, something like that might be actually kinda cool for more quantifiable stuff you could run against a database of tropes/common errors/etc. or something. there's a website where you can copy/paste text and it tells you how "bullshit-y" it is based on several algorithms, which actually worked pretty well)

Cross platform shaders is still an open problem and a highly demanded one. Personally, I would like to see proposed solution #2 (a shading language that outputs hlsl & glsl) becoming popular, but proposed solution #3 & #4 also works (#4 looks interesting).

Didn't Ogre3D do something like that, or at least use some sort of engine-specific platform-independent effects framework? Or am I remembering wrong (never used it, just browsed documentation for ideas)

And arguably, UDK does that too where it takes node-based visual material editor and spits out shader code and is cross-platform.

I know that there's a Sonic fangame that has a special mode where people can join and netgame and go into the 3D equivalent of debug mode from the original Sonic games (letting everybody place objects around), and then save the object layout. This was implemented because the level needed too many objects to be placed.

Can't get more collaborative than that, I presume?