Practical and intuitive save/load menu additions

[StroggVorbis]

I apologize if this has been brought up before, but I'd like for GZDoom to not only seperate savegames per IWAD, but also per loaded level pack, or if possible, to give the save/load menu a folder system with cascading dropdown lists. I've got a lot of saves from different mods, and even though they're sorted alphabetically, it gets tiresome to scroll through all of them, just to find the right one. Even just a search function or sorting by date, size or whatever would be enough for my needs. Except that the more saves I have, the longer it takes for the menu to load on the first startup of the engine. Is it possible or feasible to cache the saves beforehand to reduce load times?

Thx in advance.

[Kharnellius]

This would be fantastic. It would also be nice to sort the save/load screen by "save date" so I can keep the most recent saves at the top of the list since that is the most likely one I will be loading.

[Graf Zahl]

Engine side all the needed features are present (-savedir option.) The main problem is how to organize it. In general, this would be better suited for a launcher app than for the game engine itself.

[Gez]

I used to keep a long archive of saves but then I noticed two things:
1. I never loaded them anyway. If I replay something I've already finished before, I do it from the beginning, not from some midpoint save.
2. ZDoom and GZDoom updates made them impossible to load anyway, even if I wanted to

So now I just bound a key to "special autosave" and use this to keep a rotating series of 10 recent saves and that's all. Everything else is needless baggage, at least as far as I'm concerned. I only use named saves for when I interrupt a playthrough of something long to try something shorter, with planning to resume the interrupted session quickly.

[Graf Zahl]

I mostly do the same, but keep the saves separate per mod (by having a small launch script that uses the mod name as savedir folder) and I have to admit that this feature isn't something really worth more work than that.

[Enjay]

Yeah, for me, a game like Doom lends itself to utterly disposable save games. I do save while playing but for most mods the saves are just death insurance. Once I've completed the game, the save no longer has any value to me. The only time I might want a save to last a few days is if I am playing a megawad or similar. Even then, once the game is complete, the saves are of no further value. I don't think I have ever had a valuable save that needs to be kept longer than that.

Most of the time I tend just to rely on autosaves and the engine overwrites those anyway. If, however, I have built up a few manual saves too, sooner or later I just clear them out by deleting them via Windows explorer.

[StroggVorbis]

@Graf Zahl

Mind sharing your (I presume Batch) script?

[Graf Zahl]

Nothing special:

Code: Select all

start gzdoom -file episode/%1 -savedir save/%1 %*

Obviously I copy all PWADs containing levels into the 'episode' folder.
This uses 'start' to immediately close the console that gets opened by the batch. Otherwise it'd remain open in the background and get attached to GZDoom itself which I do not want. The %* at the end is to pass through additional command line arguments.

[StroggVorbis]

Thanks!