Disable Automap

[Nash]

With all due respect Eruanna I really don't see why you need to be so worked up about it... considering everyone involved in this thread already moved on... let people do what they want; it is of no consequence to the world until someone gets enough work done that this "issue" starts to physically manifest... until then, there's no point really in being angry about it because nothing has come out of any of this... :D Peace!

PS it's rather unfair to make a statement that if "something doesn't allow save states/save-anywhere, it quickly goes to the recycle bin"... there are plenty of games that are selling very well that don't have save-anywhere. It's all about context... it CAN be done right, and of course it can be done (horribly) wrong and it's very easy for the user to just dump the ones that do them wrong... the choice is entirely up to the user. :) Just as how ZDoom-exclusive projects with slopes/3D floors/true colour can be done right, but can also be done wrong (and nothing to stop you from deleting that mod or not even downloading it in the first place).

EDIT: courtesy quote because last post in previous page

ITT: Lots of bold font and feet stamping about features that break anyone trying to make a rogue-like experience.

I don't get the opposition? If you truly think disabling saves and auto map makes for a bad mod... Can't you just mod the mod to put it back in? Or is this really just a question of laziness hidden behind loud screaming of opinions?

All this gnashing of teeth actually achieves is that no one can make mods where death is a legitimate mechanic (no Souls-esque games for you) or where limiting information is paramount (auto map in an Antichamber-like experience? Hah!).

[Graf Zahl]

It's still rather irrelevant. ZDoom is an engine designed for Doom and Doom-like FPS games. These games have saves. These games have an automap. And these games have some special behavior that may not be right for some more outlandish projects.

So if you happen to make one of those outlandish projects you have to compromise if you want to use an engine that's not designed for such a game type. These game types do not get factored into my decision making, as far as ZDoom is concerned, these projects do not exist for me. The only measure for accepting or nixing a feature is its impact on FPS gameplay - and there both disabling the automap and savegames are unacceptable.

[Nash]

Graf Zahl: of course I agree that with Doom, a lack of save-anywhere is frustrating and unacceptable. Actually not just Doom but most first person shooters really (especially the modern shooters with those silly checkpoints).

[Reactor]

Well, for once, saving the game anywhere is MUCH better than checkpoint-system, especially on newer games, where you can overwrite only one checkpoint-save. If you happen to reach that with 12% health, and there are no medikits in-game whatsoever (Heat of war, Battlestrike-series etc.), I wouldn't be surprised about a permanent uninstall after the five-thousandth try and fail...

[Rachael]

Sorry, I am not trying to get worked up and angry, but admittedly I am a bit frustrated about the issue. It's a very old issue, one that I've seen being brought up off and on for years. It's not fun arguing the same point over and over again for years, but you do it when you really feel passionate about something, and it just kind of happens.

It's like I said though - if you REALLY want to block those features, all you have to do is fork ZDoom. Nuff said. It's very easy to do, and the code changes required would be quite minimal. No one has control over a forked port except the person who started the fork. So you can do whatever you want with it - as long as it doesn't get you in legal trouble, obviously. It would be nice if people respected licenses and whatnot and kept it open source, too, though, and if all you're trying to do is remove saves/automap/cheats/whatever that's very easy to do.

[Graf Zahl]

I wouldn't be surprised about a permanent uninstall after the five-thousandth try and fail...

Reminds me of the GTA series. I really liked the games but the save system was utter shit. The worst part was not that you couldn't save at any point but that the poins were so badly placed that any hard mission could devolve into a lengthy chore, because you had to go through the entire briefing and driving through the city again and again and again...

Yes, I ultimately DID uninstall the game after that and never bought the next one.

[Reactor]

GTA series were not THAT problematic in this aspect, at least not the later series. GTA 1 sucked heavily, as you had only ONE go for each mission, and if you messed up a task...well...if you wanted to complete all missions, you had to start the entire city from the very beginning!. This was especially worrisome at later missions, which needed to be unlocked by completing the previous 8 or so jobs. There, even the armorvest was almost unusable, giving only 3 hits, and most enemies fired at you with machineguns, so it was very easy to mess up. And of course, you had only limited lives. No wonder GTA cheats became so popular...
Also, there were bugged missions, which would screw up your entire progress. I remember a prematurely exploding 4×4 which you'd need to drive somewhere, and it just blew up for no reason at all. Another such mission was involved killing the DA. Once you accomplished this task, nothing happened. The arrow still pointed at the corpse, and no matter what you did, the mission would never finish.

GTA 2 was a LOT better in this aspect, saving the game was a BIG relief. It also gave you several bonus items, such as Invulnerability, making your life easier. And after restoring the saved game, all the icons were back, except "Kill Frenzy!" ones, so you could easily stack up a million and two extra lives, making game-saves abundant.
What troubled me in GTA 2 was the bugged Kill Frenzy trailers. If you completed one, and saved the game afterwards, the whole game crashed when reloading. I had to start from the very beginning, yaaaay...

[ibm5155]

I'm doing a TC from Spooky's House of Jump Scares.
There are more like more than 100000 people that loves the game, the game doesn't have an automap (and it would be dumb to have one since the map is randomly generated), and each 50 levels there's an auto save.
I wanted to implemente both features into my mod, but the I Always just get a no/don't do that only because I DON'T WANT TO MAKE A DOOM LIKE GAME!!!.
I think that was the point of making gloome, G/Zdoom engine has alot of potential, but it limits alot if you force people to make doom style games '-'
I wouldn't mind if my modified port will not be compatible with future mods, because people wouldn't care, if I release it over moddb or some indie website, people will download and play, not conplain, hur dur this doesn't run in latest zdoom (sounds like hur dur your mod isn't compatible with brutal doom, just cus me likes brutal doom)

[Caligari87]

You're not making a TC, you're trying to copy an entire game. Why should I play ibm5155's House of Jump Scares with its hacky GZDoom fork that disables automap and autosaves, instead of just playing Spooky's House of Jump Scares that does that already without any hackery?

You shouldn't be trying to copy the entire game and then complain when a completely different engine doesn't support the features you want to copy. A good TC takes concepts from the original (in this case a sequence of 1000 randomly-selected rooms with random obstacles) and makes them work in a new engine/game with its own improvements. You're not fooling anyone by disabling the automap (everyone knows what the game is doing), and you're not doing the player any favors by disabling autosave (I'm gonna savescum because I don't feel like redoing 50 fucking rooms if I make a mistake).

Hide the automap lines if you must; a player that wants them can "cheat" to re-enable. Write a script that forces an autosave every 50 rooms if you must, but I want to be able to revert if I feel like it.

[Rachael]

I was going to try and pick apart your points, Caligari, but what you said was very solid and I pretty much agree with it.

One of the most attractive things about bringing a "full game" (which is called a TC anyway) to ZDoom is the flexible features that ZDoom provides. Examples are bringing PSX Doom / Doom 64 to GZDoom. The originals did not feature saves, but rather status codes, and required special hardware/emulators to play which can be a bit of a challenge to set up. Having them in GZDoom? Full save, automap, and free view (if you enable it), plus the ability to mod the game whatever way you darn well please. Another example is the Wolf TC by AFADoomer. Wolfenstein no doubt featured a similar save system to Doom, however it was limited in a number of other ways. Playing it on GZDoom simply made the game "feel" smoother - and, obviously, if you enable it, you can have your other features too.

So I have no idea why, ibm5155, you would want to convert such a restrictive game, and preserve such restrictions. It makes no sense, and due to reasons Caligari already stated, it does kind of defeat the purpose. Of the 100000 people you said who play that game, I am pretty sure a good portion of them aren't there for the gameplay that you're trying to reproduce - there could be other reasons that draw them towards that game as well.

[VGA]

Well it would be cool if someone, to keep the TC's theme would take a topdown view of his map:
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/doo ... 0111220500

And edit it to be something more organic like:
http://mapstalgia.com/wp-content/upload ... 24x697.png

So the player has to pay attention to the various landmarks to orientate himself.

[ibm5155]

You're not making a TC, you're trying to copy an entire game. Why should I play ibm5155's House of Jump Scares with its hacky GZDoom fork that disables automap and autosaves, instead of just playing Spooky's House of Jump Scares that does that already without any hackery?

You shouldn't be trying to copy the entire game and then complain when a completely different engine doesn't support the features you want to copy. A good TC takes concepts from the original (in this case a sequence of 1000 randomly-selected rooms with random obstacles) and makes them work in a new engine/game with its own improvements. You're not fooling anyone by disabling the automap (everyone knows what the game is doing), and you're not doing the player any favors by disabling autosave (I'm gonna savescum because I don't feel like redoing 50 fucking rooms if I make a mistake).

Hide the automap lines if you must; a player that wants them can "cheat" to re-enable. Write a script that forces an autosave every 50 rooms if you must, but I want to be able to revert if I feel like it.

Well Here are my points:
-I'm making it just for fun.
-Spooky House is Windows only
-No oculus rift support.
-No android support.
aren't these options enough?
-There's no point of using an automap, if any part of the map are going to be connected (all lines are for now invisible, but people can cheat).
-The save only over fixed sectors is just an idea from the original game, there's no menu for savegames, but I didn't disabled t he hotkey for saving.

For now, I don't care if people uses some cheat to view the map, or even to use the save hotkey, the game is there for everyone change it the way they want, I just wanted to be able to disable some stuff, but well, it's doom engine, so I must follow the doom style gameplay...

And trust me, running 50 rooms can take some times 2 minutes, and there's almost no chance of player ends dead (only if he wants)

EDIT: also another map that disabled the automap as haze, instead of showing that uhh graphic style map, it showed a hand drawn map

EDIT2:
and talking about the haze, look what happens when you press the automap button

---

O NO, HERETIC, he blocked t he vector render map by this piece of papers!!!


Ok there's a way to see the automap, but it looks uggly

[Rachael]

ibm5155 - just run with it. You might not like it, but give it a shot and see how it goes. You might be surprised.

Also - in Haze, it was still possible to get the automap back. The problem with Haze is it required pretty much absolute control over your configs - which was needed in order to adjust the visual settings to make the mod work as intended. And even then, it exploited a r_visibility bug that was fixed in later ZDoom versions - so you can only even run it with older versions of ZDoom.

Haze was a good looking mod, even for being incomplete, but I didn't run it as much as I wanted to, for the reasons listed above.

[Reactor]

What about the situation where the automap does not really need to be gone alltogether, but for certain levels. Is it easier to achieve?

[Caligari87]

Set the lines to "hidden" in the editor. The player can still open the automap, but the lines won't be there. The player can of course cheat to get them back if they want to.