pwad and gameplay mod loading (windows)

[smeghammer]

Summary

I have spent many hours tinkering with Windows shortcuts, batch files and the like to set up really lazy launchers for PWADs plus one or other gameplay mod with GZDoom. I know there are SO MANY places to find this out there, but I have not found this specific way of doing it, so I will share it here.

 

I don't want to use 3rd party launchers. What I wanted to do was set up a simple launching system that uses just one installation of GZDoom, but load PWADs with different gameplay mods (Vanlla GZDoom, Brutal, Beautiful etc...) by drag and drop to desktop shortcuts.

 

The basic solution is to do the following: 

• create/copy a gzdoom-username.ini as e.g. gzdoom-xxx.ini
• add gameplay mod .pk3 file to autoload section
• create one shortcut to your GZDoom.exe per gameplay mod
• add a -config gzdoom-xxx.ini argument
• then add a -file startup command after the first one, with no value

 

Details

I set up my directory structure like so:

/DOOM
  /Brutal
  /Beautiful
  /GZDoom
    [gzdoom files]
    gzdoom-username.ini
  /IWads
  /PWads

/Brutal contains latest brutal doom .pk3 file

/Beautiful contains latest beautiful doom from GITHub, with .zip extension changed to .pk3 ('cos .ZIP and .PK3 files are the same internal format...)

/GZDoom contains GZDoom deployment and also all the required configs, which we will create later.

/IWads contain the -er- iwads... Note they are NOT in the GZDoom directory. I'll explain below.

/PWads contains all my pwads in various subfolders.

 

Set up base config

GZDoom has a whole bunch of config options, one of which is to specify the location of IWads. Therefore, to point the default gzdoom-username.ini (created on first run of GZDoom), we edit the first section in the config file to include a reference to the IWad location above:

[IWADSearch.Directories]
Path=C:\Doom\IWADs
Path=.
Path=$DOOMWADDIR
Path=$HOME
Path=$PROGDIR

 

This addition will cause GZDoom to look in the specified location for the IWads, in addition to the defaults. Therefore, running GZDoom will now result in a successful load of the game.

 

Set up configs for your gameplay mods

The config made above needs to be copied and renamed appropriately, such as gzdoom-brutal.ini. This will already contain the reference to the IWad location. Now we need to add a reference to the gameplay mod. Look for and amend the Global.Autoload section (to load for all games - you could specify only for doom 1 and doom 2 but I am lazy...) like so:

[Global.Autoload]
Path=C:\Games\Doom\Brutal\brutalv20b_R.pk3

Do similar for any other gameplay mods, so we end up with one ini file for default vanilla GZDoom and one for each gameplay mod.

 

Set up desktop launchers

The last step is to set up one desktop launcher per gameplay mod ini file.

 

You can specify a specific ini file as a gzdoom.exe startup argument as -config config-to-load.ini.

 

The key thing here as that you also need to specify the -file argument, but without any files.

 

The default behaviour for Windows drag and drop is to pass the filename(s) to the shortcut target with no flag/prefix. However, the dropped file list will be appended to any arguments already entered into the shortcut.

 

GZDoom will in fact assume that an un-parameterised file list are the wad files to run, but if any named arguments are passed, we do need to specify the -files parameter so gzdoom can sort out the file list from other arguments:

 

 

Note the reference to the config file. This will cause GZDoom to start with the specified config file and thus gameplay mod, and the shortcut will also accept dropped PWad file.

 

Therefore, you can have shortcut icons for each gameplay mod that will also accept a dropped list of custom wads...

 

Anything not clear, please comment and I will try to clarify.

 

I have also added a guide for adding launchers on Ubuntu Linux.

 

 

Edited April 3, 2020 by smeghammer