TITLEMAP

Is there any way TITLEMAP support could be added to Eternity? It's not urgent but it'd be a nice feature.

It'll work it's way in eventually (more than likely), though when that'll happen I can't be sure. I'd also like the feature in at some point, especially now that we have the specials and such needed to make a proper Quake-style starting map.

We used to have an into map from SMMU, and then one made specifically for EE that used Small scripting. The functionality to support this was gutted though (at least that's what I saw when I looked into this feature a while back). Even now, if you crack open the doom eternity.pke you'll find start.wad inside, which contains a starting map.

As I said, I can't promise when though, as it isn't something that comes extremely high on my personal list of priorities. There are some cool features I'd like in but I'm trying to focus on what I view as most important to the project (currently working on EDF Heretic inventory, and after that I'll be looking into EDF weapons).

It probably ought to be clarified that TITLEMAP and STARTMAP aren't the same thing :)

TITLEMAP is a ZDoom feature in which a map is loaded in place of the standard TITLEPIC/CREDITS/etc loop. ACS scripting and such can then be used to make that map function as a hi-res, animated title screen.

OH! That'd also be cool. Most of my statements about priority remain, but yeah I think there's never been any code to support that in EE. I'm definitely going to add this to the list of "stuff I want to see in and maybe I'll put in myself at some point" though, as it's a cool feature.

Nice :)

Loading a non-interactive map just to leverage its scripting seems like something oddly specific. I'd rather see movies and Strife-like animations than low-quality gameplay graphics.

printz said:

Loading a non-interactive map just to leverage its scripting seems like something oddly specific. I'd rather see movies and Strife-like animations than low-quality gameplay graphics.

TITLEMAP is pretty powerful. It's been used with custom graphics in a bunch of ZDoom wads to create super slick title screens that don't look at all like a map is running. (ZPack, Blade of Agony I think, etc.) I'd much much much rather have TITLEMAP support instead of having to embed a giant movie file or work with limited animation features to do what can already be done better (and in high resolution) with map scripting.

Of course it should be noted that some of the more advanced titlemaps with graphics overlays heavily depend on the HUDMessage feature in ZDoom - without that they'd indeed be mostly limited to ingame graphics. But even there some cool stuff has been made.

But when it comes to streaming movies the file size will outright kill such a feature, that may be nice in theory but certainly fail in practive. When ZDoom had its playmovie ACS command 10 years ago, nobody ever used it.

If people want to make wads that have a TITLEMAP for more than one source port, how would this be solved? Should future releases of ZDoom, Eternity, or 3DGE (if they include the feature) have their own names like ZTITLMAP, ETITLMAP, or 3TITLMAP, similar to ZMAPINFO and EMAPINFO?

Since TITLEMAP is a ZDoom initiative, ideally it shouldn't be repeated like that.

A good example of non-ZDoom TITLEMAP thing would be the intro to Doom 64.

(It was recreated/parodied in a version of Reelism as an actual TITLEMAP.)

I have been working on something similar to this, using COAL, and it is turning out to be pretty powerful - but its still in its infancy :-)