Difficulty Menu

[Springheel]

The recent discussion in the blackjacking and lockpicking threads have got me thinking about difficulty settings. To quote some of the relavent stuff:

 

I sometimes choose Normal or Hard on certain FMs plus of course, they might not be 'easy' at all but just a different style or with completely different options or objectives. The mapper has to use the difficulty options to achieve this

 

Basically, we need to decide what the "Difficulty Menu" should affect. Do certain things (AI HP, lockpicking time, etc) get modified by the difficulty chosen? Or should the Difficulty Menu only affect map-based things like objectives, number of AI, etc?

 

At the moment, it seems to do a bit of both.

 

My proposal is that we change the "Difficulty Menu" to the "Objectives Menu" (or some other name) and have it ONLY affect map-based things. The mapper chooses the number of settings, and how they will affect his map. Mappers can call them difficulty settings, playstyles, or whatever.

 

Then, we have a new menu under Gameplay Options, where players can set the difficulty of specific things, like:

 

Lockpicking "auto, easy, average, difficult"

 

Combat "easy, average, difficult"

 

AI acuity "dull, average, sharp"

 

etc.

 

That way players can customize their own difficulty level to suit their taste (some people might want challenging combat but easy lockpicking) and mappers can use the Objectives Menu as they like.

 

This is essentially a watered down version of the "customizable objectives" idea that we had at the start and eventually discarded.

 

Anyone have any strong objections to this? I could do the basic gui/graphics work necessary for the new menu, though I'll probably need some code support for some of the options.

[greebo]

It is definitely possible. Though I'm a bit hesitant when it comes to changing the GUI and code to support both. I think it's something I'd want to leave for post-1.0-release, to be honest.

[Springheel]

I think it's something I'd want to leave for post-1.0-release, to be honest.

 

I can understand that. We could leave it up to the player to modify their .cfg on their own for things like lockpicking.

 

What do the existing difficulty levels currently affect? Do they currently have any impact on game settings, or only map settings? If they currently affect any game settings we might want to consider decoupling that now, rather than changing how it works after release.

[greebo]

We already have a "Vanilla Darkmod Difficulty Settings" entityDef (tdm_difficulty.def), where we can define standard things like AI acuity, etc. Additionally to that, the mapper can also add custom difficulties in his or her map. So in principle these things are already decoupled.

 

CVARs are not affected at all by the difficulty system right now. If we wanted to have these parameters affected, we'd need to convert some of the CVARs to spawnargs, where they can be modified. Like the lockpick timeout, which then would be a spawnarg instead of a CVAR.

[Springheel]

Ok, so it wouldn't be hard to implement this idea after the release then.

[greebo]

No, we still have room for improvements after release, nothing is lost.

[Domarius]

Sounds like a great way to approach it. It always felt hack when an FM had to abuse the difficulty settings screen to get different play styles happening.