What do you want to see in a FPS kit?

Just curious, but what do you want to see in a FPS kit? Actually I was asked to start a thread on this about two weeks ago.... but the better question is: what do you want to see in an Advanced FPS Genre Kit.

The basic kit has every indication of being shipped with Torque 3d and some pre-beta testing has already been done with it. I like to think of it as a enhanced version of the old starter.fps kit. The origins of it go back to a desire to fix those old scripts and add several, what I thought of as missing, features. At one point I had 15,000 word 12 page document just detailing those fixes -- everything from art to misspellings to bad variable/parameter calls, and more. I had intended on just releasing the document as a resource but the artist I was working with at the time convinced me that we should do a how-to kit instead, which would include new artwork, documentation, and source code enhancements. Said artist was then contacted to work on artwork for Torque 3d and that project got put on hold. A few months later I was contacted by Derek here at GarageGames wanting to know if I was interested in working on the FPS kit.

Unfortunately that document and several hard-drive back-ups were consumed in a fire, so all of my Torque related work of the past year was gone. But here was a chance at a fresh start with the future of Torque, so hell yeah! I was interested.

So we started with the starter.fps (Stronghold) kit and built from there. I wont say I corrected every single one of those mistakes/bugs, in fact I may have introduced a few more myself! Ah but enough story and rambling, let's talk about features.

* 3 weapons: Steam Pistol, Rifle, RamRifle it's a rocketlauncher
* various types of weapon change methods (hotkeys: 1-XX, prev/next weapon keybind, and mouse-wheel cycling)
* a dynamic weapon HUD system with current weapon indicator, individual reticles, ammo counter, and optional zoom overlay
* multiple maps/levels and improved level selection
* multiple gametype setup -- currently Deathmatch and TeamDeathmatch game modes.
* basic and limited recoil effects -- I may remove this one because it annoys the hell out of me!
* multiple sizes of health pick-ups
* headshot and directional damage indicators
* new artwork

Plus more cool extras will be included in the basic kit. Some things were recently removed/lost, and others have been added, some minor features are still kind of floating, and I'm still testing a few other things -- but hey that's part of the value of having a beta release, right?

I also think it's safe to say that the artwork and level design will be a marked improvement over what has been offered before. Give thanks to Matt Fairfax for doing the level selection code and GUI because mine would have been much uglier! My biggest contribution was the multiple gametype setup plus setting up and tweaking the weapons -- no more recycled crossbow explosion from years ago! Well, sound hasn't been addressed completely yet so some things will sound familiar. Adding a new gametype is as simple as creating your gameplay mechanics in script, giving those functions a certain class namespace (think scripted object and packages), and creating your levels for that gametype in mind. Once that's done, in order to kick off the correct gametype code all that is needed is to add

gameType = "Name Here";

to each mission's LevelInfo object. Once the chosen mission is loaded the proper gameplay mechanics are executed for that map.

The initial design goal was to be able to allow you to create a Quake or Unreal Tournament style multiplayer game out of the box. Truth be told Torque has had that capability from day one, so an almost feature complete FPS game can be done entirely in script. Can you make a clone of COD4? Not out-of-the box with the Basic(free) kit. Now Torque 3d certainly makes it easier to enable a more modern day cutting-edge feature set, but it is still undergoing development so I've personally made every attempt to keep away from source code changes until things are more finalized.

I'm already aware of some people's desire for AI, weapon hands, iron-sights, etc., but those are things that were not part of the initial design plan and will have to addressed later. Got to save some things for an advanced kit, you know? Again, the Basic FPS kit is meant to be more of a demonstration of what's capable using the standard Torque 3d package. Certain source requiring FPS genre specific features can easily be added later.

So I ask one more time: what do you want to see in a FPS kit? More specifically what features would you find "must have" and necessary? What would you like to see addressed in an Advanced FPS kit?