Design for wait/message box GUI

[greebo]

As recently mentioned in the public forums, there is a small popup window appearing when loading a map:

 

 

I need a design suggestion for this popup, maybe some small, centered parchment on the clock background or something. In principle, I can come up with something myself, but I better leave this to the artists for consistency reasons.

[Springheel]

When does this happen? I've never seen it.

[greebo]

It frequently happens to me when I start up Doom 3 and immediately load a map (via shortcut or so). Maybe the engine is waiting on some other system to finish its initialisation process, but it definitely happens.

 

I guess the main purpose of this dialog is to say "Please wait, map loading..."

 

I should also add that we can't control this popup or stop it from being shown, that's closed source. Except for replacing the dialog with a black window - that could be a workaround.

[Springheel]

How long does it show up for? If it's just a second or two then blackness might be an acceptable option.

[greebo]

It has been for two or three seconds on my system, yes. I will change it to blackness then.

[SneaksieDave]

I encounter this semi-frequently, and yes, when immediately entering a map upon startup. Worse, when I do, it's often accompanied by a lost doomkey. If I check the file after exiting, it has been blanked out except for the "do not give this to anyone!" text. I then have to dig out my doomkey, re-enter it, and then all is well again. It's happened so many times over the years that I started simply backing up the doomkey file so I can copy it over after it happens.

 

If this and the enter-key dialog are the same, replacing it with black could have confusing/bad results. I imagine the user will just be stuck there staring at a black screen, with Doom3 expecting the key.

[greebo]

Yep, good point. I don't know whether this is the same dialog or if there are two of them, one for the CD key and one for the message. I'll have to check that.

[greebo]

Hm, I'm not getting clear results. I could easily replace the wait dialog with the standard TDM splash screen (you have to put that in the DDS folder, otherwise the Doom3 Mars picture is taken), but I can't get the CD key dialog to show up, even though I didn't change the GUI code for that.

 

I stops working as soon as I put the guis/msg.gui file in the darkmod folder (copied straight from the vanilla Doom 3 files). I'm already starting to lose interest.

[Dram]

That message is when your CDKey is being verified online. You can disable your net access and it will never show up, but normally it checks online to see if your CDKey is correct. You can test this by putting in a cdkey from serials.ws, as they're always being used by someone else.

 

@Sneaksie: Try making the doomkey file read only, probably won't touch it then.

[SneaksieDave]

Heh, good idea.

 

Couldn't write ../base/doomkey.

 

In your face, Doom3!

[Ishtvan]

I encounter this semi-frequently, and yes, when immediately entering a map upon startup. Worse, when I do, it's often accompanied by a lost doomkey. If I check the file after exiting, it has been blanked out except for the "do not give this to anyone!" text. I then have to dig out my doomkey, re-enter it, and then all is well again.

Incidentally, this happened to me about a year ago, and I can't really test the ingame shop because of it. I can't find my original key, even on the CD jewel case . It must be on the manual which is who knows where. I found that I can just open the console again despite the message and try to load a map the second time, but because of this I can't load a map our "real" way with the shop and difficulty options.

[angua]

Try blocking Doom from the internet and using a serial from the net afterwards.

 

In the base directory, there are two text files called doomkey and xpkey, which contain the serial (if doom considers them to be valid, they are missing otherwise). After you get doom running again, you can copy them somewhere as a backup.