Idea: PORT lump for WAD launchers

[Altazimuth]

Fluff

Spoiler

With all the ideas that have been bandied about recently in these forums, I've been thinking about things that could make life easier for users. After trying to think of ideas I decided to try out some random downloaded maps, but found out my port of choice wasn't able to correctly play one of the maps.

I realised that by using a plaintext lump, one could dictate to a launcher what source port is required at a minimum, and whether or not other ports can be used.

Example PORT lump for mock2.wad

STRICT ZDOOM

Example PORT lump for valiant.wad

MBF

For the Mock 2 example, the STRICT keyword states that the used port MUST be ZDoom, whereas for Valiant the minimum required port is MBF, and any compatible port on the user's system could be used. Launchers could store an individual user's list of preferred ports in either ascending or descending order, for example if I set my list of preferred engines as {Eternity, PRBoom+, ZDoom, ChocolateDoom} then for Valiant, Eternity would be the chosen engine (if the list is Most->Least desirable). If it were in the opposite order, ZDoom would be picked as Chocolate Doom cannot run MBF wads.

This should prove fairly easy to implement in the launcher, but it may prove a bit problematic reserving a specific lump name, alternatively one could have the lump use any name and provide something to identify the lump at the top of the file.

If one were to associate a launcher with the .wad filetype this would make running wads with the correct/desired source port as simple as double clicking on the file.


What do you guys think of this idea? I'd be interested for opinions from both developers and end users.

(Thanks for the STRICT idea, jmickle.)

[40oz]

What is the idea exactly? That everyone in the community needs to start doing this?

[Altazimuth]

40oz said:

What is the idea exactly? That everyone in the community needs to start doing this?

Nobody needs to do it. I am merely suggesting it as a feature that would make things a lot more convenient for players, and it would take a very short time to create the lump using SLADE (which could be made even shorter if editors started doing this for the player). Whether a mapper includes it is at their discretion.

[40oz]

I don't really have any problem with it really, but I really don't see something like this becoming the norm. As a player, I load wads from the command line, so I personally wouldn't have any use for this. And as a mapper whose body of work is mostly single maps uploaded on the archive, half of those were made without me having to use a lump editor at all. I'm not sure id really care enough to open it up to appease the minority of people who use a wad launcher. I'm probably more likely to check if my maps work in brutal doom.

Sorry that was kinda rude, I know you have the best intentions, but does this lump do anything that the /IDGAMES .txt generator doesn't? Couldn't a wad launcher just as easily search for the "Advanced Source Port:" string in the wads text file and use whatever comes after it as a reference to what port to default to?

[Gez]

Well this is an idea for launchers and front end, so you'd need to get the developers of these programs on board. Otherwise, it's mostly pointless.

PORT is perhaps too generic, maybe PORTINFO would be less likely to be used for a airport sound or an USB port texture.

Also, instead of MBF Valiant would rather list PrBoom+, Eternity, ZDoom, GZDoom, Zandronum; because it doesn't rely only on MBF features. There can be other cases where compatibility is for ports that don't have much in common otherwise, Xaser's "Lost Episode" mod can run in ZDoom and Eternity, and Hacx 2.0 is also planned for ZDoom and Eternity.

I imagine you'd probably need to be able to put versions in there.

[VGA]

Meh, this will become outdated and useless in a few years. Not to mention the launchers need to be updated, good luck updating the most(?) popular one, ZDL.

Plus, I don't want to have to check inside wads to see if they include this lump.

[Graf Zahl]

The horror...

- Dumb mapper assumes that this is the (only) way to define which port to use.
- Important info is left out of the .txt file
- people have trouble finding out what is needed to play the map because they have no clue how to look at a WAD's contents.

[Altazimuth]

40oz said:

Couldn't a wad launcher just as easily search for the "Advanced Source Port:" string in the wads text file and use whatever comes after it as a reference to what port to default to?

Very good point. That would also make for a very cool feature, and would eliminate the need for any additional work on the part of the mapper.

[40oz]

I'm sure there may be formatting issues related to it, or misspellings that the launcher would need to know how to catch. Maybe the idgames txt generator could have the advanced source ports field be a list of checkboxes of commonly used source port levels, instead of a blank field you fill in yourself.