Doomsday Engine

I wonder if an RFE's sub forum, on the Dday forums, might be cool?

Deng team then create tracker items for ones they think are possible (that include links to the forum threads, so Deng team could then see how popular X RFE is, which would be a useful tool to analyse RFE priority)?

Personally I believe we should look to retain game menus comparable to those found in the original games. The issue I have with the current Options menu is the lack of a coherent design vision. The game menus cannot provide the same quality user experience that Doomsday's 2.0 UI does. However, the game menu should remain from the perspective of emulating the original game(s).

What I would like to see is new functionality presently in the Options menus moved to the new UI and push to more closely emulate the original functionality in the game menus. Assuming this, users will immediately recognize the original game when looking at the game menu, with a shortcut to the taskbar taking them to the Doomsday UI - best of both worlds IMO.

If we start chopping up the game menu and removing/replacing original game functionality then where does one draw the line? For example, I could make the case that the episode selection menu is utterly simplistic and could be replaced with a far better version implemented in Doomsday's 2.0 UI, with a brief and in-menu image preview of the episode etc...

Removing menus simply because they present options also available elsewhere is not a logical reason to do so. I agree that there is potential to confuse/mislead the user given the incoherent design of the current game menu. The way I see it, the fault is the design itself, i.e., don't try to shoehorn new functionality into the game menu - instead, make it immediately obvious that this is an emulation and users will automatically think to look elsewhere for the new functionality. Its a matter of considered design.

skyjake wrote:

But we should remember that even though the game menus remain vanilla, Doomsday can still offer its own way of selecting the episode and starting the game. Particularly MP game configuration will necessitate this kind of functionality in the task bar.

Absoluetly. However to do this will mean processing MAPINFO (etc...) in Ring Zero, which in turn means revising game resource location and more. Its certainly something we should push toward but this will also be a more long term goal.

Rather than redesigning game definitions/resources to be understandable by Doomsday in Ring Zero — which is indeed a longer term objective — as a first step I would look into a mechanism for the game plugin to "inject" settings, data, and menus into the task bar, the settings dialogs, and editors. In practice, this would probably be based on ScriptedInfo, where the game could declaratively specify the structure of whatever needs to be presented (on a pretty abstract level), with Doomsday Script functions used for custom actions.

At this point this is just an idea, I don't have any more concrete plans on exactly what these menus would contain (apart from, of course, episode/player class selection, etc.).

(Naturally this relates to #1197).

Naturally, a mechanism like that involving the game plugins necessitates making the plugin active and giving it access to the game resource data. In which case, it would only be possible to "inject" such menus once a game has already been chosen and loaded.

Consequently, this seems like a bit of a red herring to me. I would much rather continue on the current trajectory and not waste time developing systems that ultimately may not be needed for this purpose.

It is important to note there is a logical distinction regarding what is needed for episode and skill level definition in Ring Zero vs defining menus for general game options. The latter could be done with a mechansim involving the game plugin once loaded. However the former should not as doing so undermines the core principals of Ring Zero itself - "how come I can change the game at any time but I can only pick an episode once its loaded"?

To clarify, I was talking about the first step toward #1197. In Ring Zero, these "injections" would not be occurring since no game is loaded.

@DaniJ
May I ask for clarification; are you talking about maintaining the original menu's complete with their original options, or are you talking about maintaining the original menu's general appearance (more of a visual theme)?

I understood he was talking about both the visual style and the contents.

I’m personally not sure the original game menus can easily co-exist with the functionality Deng Team plan to introduce in future without a negative impact on usability (notably game profiles).

But I also don’t personally wish to see the iconic menu’s retired completely.

Thus I would like to raise the suggestions of audio and visual themes for the taskbar when one is in a game and also re-organizing the taskbar to feature something of a ‘main menu’ that features most of the options of the typical games main menu?

Themes:
At its simplest level, I'm thinking font/icon colour (i.e red for Doom, green for Heretic etc). If things go further, perhaps the games font’s (Dday already constructs the existing options menus from these) could be used and logo graphic could appear somewhere over the game screen (i.e. when running Doom, the M_DOOM graphic could appear the top of the screen, though some mods repurpose the M_DOOM graphic to frame the entire original game menu).

The audio is, naturally, the typical sound effects used by each game, if any, when moving between menu's/highlighting options.

Main Menu:
A third drop down menu could be added to the right side of the taskbar as a complete replacement for the game menu, or possibly as a replacement for the existing two, solely related to game level options, such as ‘new game’, ‘multiplayer’ ‘quit game’ ‘options’ ‘controls’ etc.

Of course, one might argue that requiring the user to navigate this new menu, might impact usability.

Conclusion:
Obviously the above is probably very crude, but I think that so far, all the talk has been on adapting the game menu’s, when the taskbar could also be adapted to possibly satisfy everyone?

Indeed I was speaking of emulating both behavior and audio/visual aspects including page layouts (with a concession to support new episodes and skill levels for useability sake (as it is now)).

The task bar would also provide the same basic features of the vanilla game menu, integrated with the new functionality and presented in a more user friendly way. (In practice I expect users will gravitate to using the task bar).

I'm not sold on the idea of applying different skins to the task bar depending on the game. It seems both confusing and unnecessary.

Other source ports that I've used for various games have menu's/UI pretty much like Dday pre taskbar; the original main game menus intact with reworked options menus.

This is fine for when a port only supports one game or a bunch of very similar games (i.e the typical Doom port) and my idealistic preference (i.e maintain the original main menu and new game options, but rework the options menu; in Dday's case, shift all options to the taskbar UI and have the main menu 'options' option open the taskbar).

But I also accept that Dday wishes to push the UI further than any other source port in both features and functionality (i.e the taskbar, in engine game switching, game profiles) and will also uniquely support multiple 2.5d fps; maintaining the original menu's without modification for all the Doom, Wolf, Builld etc engines, along with scriptable menus might become prohibitive, confusing and unnecessary? Get in the way of usability and hinder the new features; hence my wondering about visual themes (though I wasn't personally envisaging notable layout differences between games as I think, DainJ appears to be envisaging).

Of course though, no matter how convoluted the UI for something is, if the result is worth it (i.e the games themselves are worth using in Dday over another port), users will tolerate it.