Quasar
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Posts: 4615
Registered: 08-00 |
EDF did have support for specifying actors in general (and not just static decor) just before DECORATE added it, but the ability to spawn actors by name had already existed in ZDoom for a long time before that and was in fact partially what drove me toward the same implementation for Eternity.
And I will actually admit to, in some cases quite deliberately, choosing different names for the thingtypes in EDF, chiefly for the very reason that was being discussed in this thread. I felt that the names in ZDoom were variously confusing, tangential to the thing's purpose, or just outright bizarre in a few cases.
I felt that preferring names which reflect what end users know the objects as (ex: Mancubus, not Fatso; or BeerStein and not TableShit5 or whatever) would result in a much more user-friendly editing experience.
I was never aware that there was a deliberate attempt to keep compatible linedef numbers between Legacy and DosDOOM/EDGE but obviously I have never been privy to nor asked to cooperate in any shared standard with those ports.
I'm not entirely sure, to be honest, how this is such a big deal to begin with. I don't really understand how it affects ZDoom other than you want to add the ability to load Eternity in DOOM format maps without having to do any special work to identify them as such. We simply cannot make some of the concessions you'd want us to make and it's not technically justified simply because it would make another port have an easier time loading our maps. We watch out for our own functionality first.
RE: not making sense to add ZDoom names to thingtypes after the fact, what else would you suggest? Throwing out Eternity's existing mnemonics would break EDF compatibility all the way back to when it was first created, which would include breaking De Kerker, one of the only actually released Eternity maps, as well as the Vapordemo, and many of the EDF patches I have uploaded over the years as demos or for fun. In short, that's not viable at all, whereas adopting the ability to have a secondary name lookup for thingtypes is both relatively simple and inexpensive. So which makes the most sense when I put it in that light?
Last edited by Quasar on 06-02-11 at 01:08
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05-29-11 13:04 
