Excellent source port, minor interface feedback

[vadrig4r]

I just wanted to congratulate the Eternity team on a very polished and high quality port, and to provide some interface feedback and ask a couple of questions. For reference this is all on a Windows 7 SP1 machine running EE 4.00.00 Völuspá.

 

Menu
- In the key bindings menu, binding a key that is also the first letter of a bindable function on that page will highlight that function immediately after binding the key—e.g. binding strafe left to 'a' will highlight 'attack/fire'.
- Is there any option for kills/items/secrets widgets in the automap so that I can still use the original status bar rather than the Boom HUDs? I couldn't find it, I think it would be a useful feature for players fond of the old school HUD.
- The status bar option 'numbers like doom' is somewhat vague, maybe 'use red numbers' or inversely 'colorize numbers' would be more immediately understandable.
- I really love the ingame wad directory feature, is there any way to 'refresh' upon loading a new wad to avoid content from prior wads (title screens, typefaces etc.) being maintained unless the new wad replaces them?

- Is there an option to default to using a particular IWAD (say, Doom II) and skip the launch screen until you manually reactivate it?

 

Display
- In fullscreen, when not in control of the Doomguy—i.e. end of level screens and menus—the OS mouse cursor is displayed and becomes active, not just an aesthetic problem, but also resulting in being able to click outside of the program in a multi-monitor setup and minimizing Eternity (unaffected by window grabs mouse).
- Is there any option to disable display of the system console window, as in Chocolate Doom/PRBoom+?

- Title bar buttons for the main engine window to be able to quickly close/minimize would be useful (or if they do exist, they do not render on my machine).
- On my 1920x1080 monitor, selecting a 4:3 resolution results in a centered box similar to the old SDL1.x Chocolate Doom rendering. Is there any option (or possibility in the future) to have a vertically filled 4:3 screen with black bars only on the sides, as has been achieved with the SDL2 Chocolate branch?

 

Overall I'm very impressed by this expanded feature set engine that nevertheless manages to maintain the feel, style and function of the original game, thanks to its well designed menu features and sane defaults; I can't wait to try out some of it's more advanced features.

Edited December 7, 2018 by vadrig4r

[Altazimuth]

Hi! Thanks for all the feedback.

Menu:

1. I fixed that a bit back. Sorry that I didn't manage to catch it before the release.
2. I don't think so but I'm not 100% certain. As I said though I don't think so.
3. Noted. The option menus require a big overhaul but nobody wants to attempt to do so. Smaller changes like what you suggested are sensible though, and help disambiguate in the meantime.
4. In-game WAD loading is a bit dicey. printz made some good strides to making it robust, but I still don't know just how feasible it would be to actually support full dynamic reloading of everything.
5. Not that I'm aware of.

 

Display:

1. Not sure what to do about that. If it were changed I'm sure somebody would complain.
2. Not that I know of? It could be looked into though, albeit I'm not sure how to achieve that.
3. Title bar buttons are disabled on Windows for whatever reason. I'm not exactly sure why. I think it might have caused issues once upon a time, or on XP?
4. No, but I can look into that at some stage (I make no promises because I'm extremely unreliable at this stage).

I appreciate the kind words about the engine, and am glad you're enjoying this.

[vadrig4r]

Thanks for the reply! I found the latest devbuilds and it seems that the resolution now vertically fills my 16:9 monitor which is great, and as you said the key bindings quirk was already fixed. As regards the mouse cursor popping up in fullscreen, it just seems strange because it is completely non-functional in the menus and is unlike any behavior in other ports. I understand if it's some odd Windows behavior and would be more trouble fixing than it's worth for such a minor issue, but I could not imagine anyone would be reliant upon a non-functional OS cursor in menus.

 

Once again, thanks for the detailed reply and best of luck with Eternity's continued development.

[printz]

The funny mouse cursor appeared as a side effect of changing the SDL video backend of Eternity. I agree it's out of place and we should fix it, even vanilla Doom has mouse support in menus, albeit without a cursor.

[vadrig4r]

Oh yeah that's right, I completely forgot Doom had menu mouse selection because I always use novert/novert emulation.