ideas re zdoom and doom in general

[rampancy]

1. (g)ZDoom - It would be very nice if a user could map the "esc" key to a joystick device through the menu.

2. All Doom ports - Midi music volume leveling - Midi playback levels vary too greatly from one map to the next. I love music, and I love Doom music. I also understand artists own their works and the importance of musical dynamics. However when playing Doom music is only one part of the experience, and unfortunately that part is almost always to soft to hear over gunfire or too loud to hear the monsters. This tends to get really out of control in many wonderful wads, often those with multiple composers. I find myself having to go to the menu at the beginning of every level to find the best output balance between the two audio sources (midi and sfx). You can see how this also relates to point number one. Maybe two gui sliders would do the trick, one for the lowest allowable midi playback level, and one for the highest.

My current fix is to apply svm via x-fi control panel but this is an imperfect solution as i can hear the music volume come back up when the shooting stops meaning the card is treating both audio sources (midi and sfx)as one whole (seems likely). It would be better if this could be applied to the midi playback independently. Is this feasible?

3. crazy idea - id3 tags for doom wads!? well that's not exactly what the idea is, but close. Imagine the bastard offspring of a non existant menu driven gui doom launcher and winamp. What if said launcher listed "good names" for all your wads so that you didn't have to rename them. Maybe it could pull the name from the readme files in the zip where the wad is located. You could rate all your wads, sort them by favorites, abc, date, whatever. no more wad hunting. perhaps the idgames archive could be used as a sort of "whitelist" or directory of proper file names, sizes and release dates. also perhaps this could be taken from the readme files if they had some sort of predefined format. Perhaps it could also pull titlepic for the background when you select a wad or play the title track from that wad.

I suppose the goal is to eliminate wad hunting and get people into the game fast and easy. Modeled after the in-game doom menu, it would allow me to set all my paths and remember my setup on a per wad basis; what mods did i load, deh patches, etc. no more drag and drop or commandline, now i can launch up any config i can think of from my couch without touching a keyboard or mouse after one initial setup. So it's a high quality fullscreen menu driven gui that looks like the doom menu, saves all ur configs and paths and utilizes a wad "playlist" with "goodnames." Want it to be port independent, just executing windows commands to launch the game through the interface.

[Graf Zahl]

2 is indeed a problem. That's, why years ago I added a $musicvolume option to SNDINFO with which you can adjust music volume per song.

[rampancy]

Thank you for replying. I really appriciate your work. I will try and research what you said on the wiki and elsewhere. Is number one so simple as modifying my ini? I was just suprised it was not in the menu but I can understand why it is not a high priority. Maybe soon I will stop being a passive observer and be able to contribute. There is a lot that I don't know yet.

Number 3 is just me sharing my vision of what I think I'd like to see. It is a huge time consuming ordeal cataloging 20 years of wads and playing betas just remembering what is what. Bc I can download em way faster than i can beat them. And Doom is more replayable than damn near anything. There must be thousands of potential quality Doom hours made by the fans. This is pretty unique in the whole world.