Remarks about the ways FMs are handled

[Briareos H]

The Dark Mod is clearly one of the best mods I have played. It captures so much of the Thief experience, and I have made it clear (I hope) in other threads that many of the first ever (!) missions for TDM are fantastic. However, I have a few gripes about the mod and the way missions are handled. I'm going to make a poll, because I wonder whether people really do not mind those issues or they just don't come over to the forums.

 

1. Right now, the 13 missions I have in the doom3 root folder take up 460MB of disk space. From the in-game menu, I can install them but there is no way to remove those folders. I think that if you're making a nice interface to install FMs, especially helpful for clueless players, you can't ask them to remove the folders manually to free some space. Also error-prone (oops I accidentally base folder).
2. Linked indirectly to the first remark, I find that having the game restart when installing/uninstalling a mission through the in-game list (which is without the ability to sort/filter the missions and only 15 of them displayed at a time in 1680x1050) is quite annoying. I KNOW an external launcher has been discussed and was decided against, but quite frankly I disagree. I also don't see the point to spend some dev time keeping it all to the in-game launcher when it is bound to have the limitations imposed by Doom3. An OS-integrated interface is the fastest, cleanest way to go.
3. Finally, I had another suggestion in another thread:

   How about a "click to start" right after loading the mission? I don't know if this is yet possible within the limited Doom 3 SDK. This way, people could go do something else while loading without any fear of the FM starting and potentially missing stuff. From the opposite point of view, this could allow mission designers to script the mission from the very start, various things happening -a camvator, a dialogue, some text displayed- with the certainty that the player is there and fully prepared to witness it.

   This was present in the original games, how about adding it in?

Edited March 21, 2010 by Briareos H

[Chiron]

A way to clean the Doom/TDM directory up would be nice.

I'd really like some Darkloaderlike columns:

- Date of the Fm!

- Date of the last play

- Ability to set flags like "Completed on hard"

- Version of the FM

- Author

- Size

plus sorting them with any of those as a criteria.

[New Horizon]

An OS-integrated interface is the fastest, cleanest way to go.

 

Fast and easy, for now, but the end goal is to improve these issues when Doom 3 is fully sourced to us.

 

Having the launcher contained ingame felt like the more professional route.

 

Until D3 is fully open sourced there will be a few issues to contend with, but when the source is fully released...having an ingame launcher already coded and working will make for a smoother transition.

 

Patience.

[Briareos H]

Having the launcher contained ingame felt like the more professional route.

 

That's precisely the point I'm arguing against. Unless the Dark Mod UI starts using clean 11-pt sans-serif fonts with a white background and immediate response, drag-n-drop installing/uninstalling without any screen flickering, allowing potentially hundreds of FMs to be sorted, multi-selected, removed, rated, etc. from a contextual right-click menu, then the in-game mission selector will always feel less professional than a clean launcher.

Edited March 21, 2010 by Briareos H

[SiyahParsomen]

I voted yes for Pause before starting a mission. Since loading durations are long, I leave it for couple of minutes to take a cup of tea or something. Plus, it may be way of dealing with lag at the begining.

[Serpentine]

The simple reply is that the most of these requests can be managed without any internal TDM code changes - tho pause before mission makes sense with large missions etc it would require a bit of code on the TDM side.

 

As for FM management, everything is managed in simple flat files and plaintext, it would be quite easy to come up with a system that does all of the requested operations, however at the moment you are pretty much direction-less in the 'who will do it' department. The TDM team isn't covered in copious code monkeys sadly, as such their time should focus on what they enjoy and if they aren't offering straight up to make a launcher threads like this are a bit pointless.

 

I'm sure if community member(s) put together a launcher that was platform independent and not bogged down by too much clutter it would get adopted.

[New Horizon]

That's precisely the point I'm arguing against. Unless the Dark Mod UI starts using clean 11-pt sans-serif fonts with a white background and immediate response, drag-n-drop installing/uninstalling without any screen flickering, allowing potentially hundreds of FMs to be sorted, multi-selected, removed, rated, etc. from a contextual right-click menu, then the in-game mission selector will always feel less professional than a clean launcher.

 

Like I said though, when it's open sourced the potential to do anything we want will be pretty much wide open.

 

It was our choice to do it this way, and personally I'll stand behind it. We had the ability to have an integrated loading menu, so we went for it. When D3 is open sourced, our foundation will have already been laid.

 

I understand where you're coming from, but there is still much that can be done with the in game menu that our team just hasn't had time to explore yet. As the need arises, the menu will no doubt be enhanced and when we have the source code, it can be liberally enhanced.

 

Serpentine is also correct in saying that any 'platform independent' launcher would like be adopted if our main menu doesn't end up satisfying.

 

Also, as I requested earlier, please be patient.

[greebo]

Right now, the 13 missions I have in the doom3 root folder take up 460MB of disk space. From the in-game menu, I can install them but there is no way to remove those folders. I think that if you're making a nice interface to install FMs, especially helpful for clueless players, you can't ask them to remove the folders manually to free some space. Also error-prone (oops I accidentally base folder).

This has been brought up a lot, and I partially can see the problem. I guess it's not too much of a deal to implement an "Uninstall and Remove FM" option to the mission menu. Though we are still speaking about a few hours of coder time, I reckon. Right now, I think I'm the only active and experienced coder left on the team, as most others are swamped in real life. They'll come back, but don't expect this mod team to act like it consists of company employees who have nothing else to do than to work on the game. I'm no different either, I have a hard time finding free hours to do any coding for the mod.

 

Linked indirectly to the first remark, I find that having the game restart when installing/uninstalling a mission through the in-game list (which is without the ability to sort/filter the missions and only 15 of them displayed at a time in 1680x1050) is quite annoying. I KNOW an external launcher has been discussed and was decided against, but quite frankly I disagree. I also don't see the point to spend some dev time keeping it all to the in-game launcher when it is bound to have the limitations imposed by Doom3.

I had this discussion in another forum, and it seems people really make an issue about that single game restart. It takes about 5 seconds to restart Doom 3 after the mission is installed, which (compared to the time you spend in the mission) is negligible, but yet folks cannot handle that. Is this really much of a showbreaker, I wonder, to justify writing a completely new stand-alone launcher? I also doubt that you understand the amount of work necessary to pull that off, frankly:

 

An OS-integrated interface is the fastest, cleanest way to go.

Don't forget that we have two platforms to support, Windows and Linux. How do you suggest should we handle that? Write two loaders? Write a single loader, ignoring support for Linux (how it usually happens in the industry)?

 

Of course, one could go and write a platform-independent library which could be used by two front-end applications, one for Windows and one for Linux. But hey, we already have that in the form of Doom 3's libraries, plus we even have a cross-platform User Interface system, which is integrated into Doom 3 itself. You'd have a tough time convincing me to spend a lot of time reinventing something which is already there. You see my point?

 

I hope you understand my/our position. Just logging into a forum and saying "this is how it should be" is not cutting it when it comes to ideas taking literally hours and days of work somebody else would end up doing. We have lots of people around here with lots of good ideas, but ideas are a dime a dozen. I'm not telling you to bugger off, not at all, in fact I can see your points, but I want to make you see the mod team's position.

[snobel]

The pause-before-start function is a good idea.

 

I like the simplicity of the in-game loader If there's a need for a complex, external mission manager then Garrettloader claims to support TDM. (Haven't actually tried it.)

[Tels]

I had this discussion in another forum, and it seems people really make an issue about that single game restart. It takes about 5 seconds to restart Doom 3 after the mission is installed, which (compared to the time you spend in the mission) is negligible, but yet folks cannot handle that. Is this really much of a showbreaker, I wonder, to justify writing a completely new stand-alone launcher? I also doubt that you understand the amount of work necessary to pull that off, frankly:

 

There is also the issue that a stand-alone launcher cannot avoid the restart completely. If you select the mission you want to play upfront and start D3 with the right parameters, bingo, avoided restart. However, if you then decide to play another mission, you need to exit D3, choose the other mission and restart D3. You gain nothing in that case.

 

Plus, with minute-long loading times of missions, I too cannot see the big deal of the 5 second restart time.

 

About cross-platform: Don't forget that Linux is even more fragmented than Windows. On the win side, you only need to support win32 and it will run on anything that has NT, XP, Vista or 7. (and in an emulation under 64bit). With Linux,you got to choose between Gnome and KDE as the windowmanager, various 32/64bit probles, different distributions with different libs etc.

[Briareos H]

I hope you understand my/our position. Just logging into a forum and saying "this is how it should be" is not cutting it when it comes to ideas taking literally hours and days of work somebody else would end up doing. We have lots of people around here with lots of good ideas, but ideas are a dime a dozen. I'm not telling you to bugger off, not at all, in fact I can see your points, but I want to make you see the mod team's position.

[/color]

 

 

Yeah that is all easily understandable and there's no need to be defensive. I know perfectly well that implementing a different way to handle FMs would take a lot of time, especially making it multiplatform* and efficient (search and filter algorithms) with clean UI. My original idea for this thread was rather to understand why people think -putting all developing-time constraints aside- that an in-game launcher is a preferable idea from an usability-centric view.

As for developing an external launcher, I don't see why anyone from the team should do it. This is the perfect thing for someone external to the project to take upon ; not me or I would already have done something instead of posting threads, obv.

 

 

The feature request for a pause before start still stands, however

 

*though a well-concieved GTK solution should allow the toolchain to build seamlessly for both platforms

[Serpentine]

I'm going to make a curses based launcher for *nix to spite you

[Tels]

*though a well-concieved GTK solution should allow the toolchain to build seamlessly for both platforms

 

We already have problems that people cannot run tdm_launcher.linux on Gentoo 64bit platforms. What makes people think a dedicated launcher with a GUI will have *less* problems? *sigh*

[Briareos H]

Because there are countless frontend-based programs on sourceforge that already work perfectly on all platforms? *SIGH*

Edited March 22, 2010 by Briareos H

[New Horizon]

Because there are countless frontend-based programs on sourceforge that already work perfectly on all platforms? *SIGH*

 

No single 'solution' will ever be without 'problems'.

 

As time and motivation allows, the menu will be improved. I don't think it's nearly as bad to work with as it has been made out to be here. Back in the days of DOS, I'm sure this menu would have been a dream. lol

 

In any case, as time / motivation permits, I'm sure it will be looked into.

 

I would love to find a couple of dedicated coders willing to work on the menu, but recruiting new coders hasn't been easy.

[Tels]

Because there are countless frontend-based programs on sourceforge that already work perfectly on all platforms? *SIGH*

 

And they usually do this because they are well written, well maintained and often patched, upgraded and recompiled. Unless we find someone who will do all three things, it won't gonna happen (see tdm_launcher issue with GCC and libraries on Gentoo).