User-overridable save and automap blocker (MAPINFO)

[Arctangent]

If I came across a mod that was trying to prevent me saving

Thing is, nothing about this prevents you from saving. This entire pull request, regardless of the default, is basically the most upfront way of suggesting not saving: by, instead of to having to read a text file, having you see that saving isn't an intended part of the experience straight from the menu. At no point is the ability to save actually taken away from you, though - it's just put behind an override, effectively the same thing as putting sv_cheats to 1 if you want to used god mode in Nightmare!.

[_mental_]

I think it’s OK to have this thing merged. If I got it right, the idea is to simplify life of forked projects by reducing amount of custom changes. To set a new default value of one CVAR is much easier than to manage modifications in 10+ files.

[Nash]

I think it’s OK to have this thing merged. If I got it right, the idea is to simplify life of forked projects by reducing amount of custom changes. To set a new default value of one CVAR is much easier than to manage modifications in 10+ files.

Yessss. You have understood my intentions 100% before I even got a chance to explain myself. Thank you. :)

[gramps]

I'm not sure if the message I tried to convey in my last comment was clear, I didn't see any response to it. Just to reiterate, with LevelCompatibility, it's entirely possible to have levels that *will* corrupt the savegame if the player saves the game on these levels, and there appears to be no way around it... to avoid corrupting the savegame, it *has* to be saved from a different level. This isn't a case of a modder forcing their preferences on the user, it's a case of simply making the mod playable and not broken. A feature like this is essential for getting this to work properly, as far as I can tell; otherwise savegame can easily be corrupted by accident.

If I'm wrong about this, please correct me. I'd rather not have to use a feature like this, and just let the user save normally. But I've spent some time trying to do that, and asked about it here, and it doesn't appear to be possible.

[Chris]

EDIT: Also, I just noticed the bit about blocking the automap. This is a terrible idea, and the only reason anyone would ever want to disable the automap is because they are ashamed of their level design and wish to hide it from the player as much as possible.

Or they want to rely on the player having proper navigation skills, not relying on an auto-generated map giving you details on rooms you've glanced at, instead of just twitchy shooter skills. As it is, mappers can already set a level to have the lines all set to invisible in the automap, making the automap useless. A feature like this, if it's toggleable at runtime, can help since it's the map can be turned back on (either by the player, or by the mod at some point in the map) instead of being a static state baked into the map geometry.

[Kinsie]

Look - if we don't come to SOME sort of compromise, this is one of those things that could legitimately rip close friends apart.

This is ridiculously melodramatic. If you're taking proposed features for what you openly admit is "a fucking source port for a 25 year old game" this seriously, you might be too close to your own work and need to take a step back.

Again, this is a feature being added for one specific project that's going to fork the engine anyway. (And stand-alone projects should fork the engine. Ion Maiden uses a fork of eDuke32 with minor tweaks to supplement the mostly scripted additions, and that's by the source port's developers!) It belongs in the mainline, for-mods-not-for-standalone-games branch about as much as modifying the Options Menu to remove unnecessary features like the Compatibility menu does. And besides, we've had problems with overly-specific feature additions causing issues later down the line in the past, this will not be an exception. It's never too late to learn from past mistakes.

[dpJudas]

Again, this is a feature being added for one specific project that's going to fork the engine anyway.

Clearly you've never tried to maintain a long term fork of GZDoom and seen what happens. Code gets changed, refactored and moved around that given enough time you will be getting merge conflicts. The more small changes you need to do here and there, the more merge conflicts you get..

[Graf Zahl]

Rachael's melodramatic reasoning only reinforces my belief that this has no place in the engine.

Regarding the automap, one thing I noticed recently is that any HUD overlay will obstruct the automap - intentional or not - so I was already seriously considering adding a switch that simply disables all custom 2D rendering when the automap is active. The mod where this bothered me was Enjay's Burghead mod where in the end you run with a gas mask on through the bunker labyrinth and the gas mask overlay makes it very hard to see anything on the automap at all.

Personally I think that adding this feature sends the completely wrong message to our modders and that's why I'm going to wait a bit to see what the discussion here brings out.

Concerning the level compatibility, I am already evaluating some means to have one RNG seeded in a way that allows retrieving this before loading a savegame so that randomizing levels this way can be done without killing savegame support.

[Kinsie]

Regarding the automap, one thing I noticed recently is that any HUD overlay will obstruct the automap - intentional or not - so I was already seriously considering adding a switch that simply disables all custom 2D rendering when the automap is active. The mod where this bothered me was Enjay's Burghead mod where in the end you run with a gas mask on through the bunker labyrinth and the gas mask overlay makes it very hard to see anything on the automap at all.

I like this idea. I don't recall a lot of situations where it was a serious problem, but I'm not opposed to it.

Concerning the level compatibility, I am already evaluating some means to have one RNG seeded in a way that allows retrieving this before loading a savegame so that randomizing levels this way can be done without killing savegame support.

Don't savegames already save some kind of RNG seed? I remember having problems with Reelism where autosaves made on map-start would result in getting the same results from the ACS random int calls a couple of seconds later.

[gramps]

Concerning the level compatibility, I am already evaluating some means to have one RNG seeded in a way that allows retrieving this before loading a savegame so that randomizing levels this way can be done without killing savegame support.

Thanks for taking a look at this, I agree it's best handled elsewhere. Actually I'm now storing the results of what the RNG generated, to avoid having to generate it again, which works pretty well (except the problem with saves). If there were a way to have it transparently load up some safe dummy map at the beginning, before loading the real level, then static thinkers would be ready when levelcompat runs, and we could save the seed or whatever state we need there.

Anyway, that's just a thought, it's really a topic for another thread.

Kinsie: they do, but it's not ready when LevelCompat runs for the first time when loading.

[dpJudas]

Personally I think that adding this feature sends the completely wrong message to our modders and that's why I'm going to wait a bit to see what the discussion here brings out.

The politics in this is really what should scare you. By the end of the day I guess you'll have to decide: do you want GZDoom be useful as a base for non-doom mods or not.

There are plenty of genres where arbitrary game saving is blocked on purpose as it ruins the point of how the game is played. GTA missions comes to mind as one such example - if you allowed save-scumming there would be no challenge left. The missions are carefully designed to tell a story while giving you a few places that can make you fail the mission, yet still keep the difficulty a little random in the sense that they need to make every player eventually get past it. If you allow players to save there you'd have to heavily bump up the difficulty level, not to mention most missions wouldn't be fun at all. Figuring out what you are supposed to do while failing is half the fun of the GTA missions.

[Graf Zahl]

Don't savegames already save some kind of RNG seed? I remember having problems with Reelism where autosaves made on map-start would result in getting the same results from the ACS random int calls a couple of seconds later.

Yes, but the LevelCompatibility runs before loading the savegame and goes into the unsaved base level state. So this cannot be part of the regular savegame but instead needs to be read before the level is loaded

[Graf Zahl]

There are plenty of genres where arbitrary game saving is blocked on purpose as it ruins the point of how the game is played. GTA missions comes to mind as one such example - if you allowed save-scumming there would be no challenge left. The missions are carefully designed to tell a story while giving you a few places that can make you fail the mission, yet still keep the difficulty a little random in the sense that they need to make every player eventually get past it. If you allow players to save there you'd have to heavily bump up the difficulty level, not to mention most missions wouldn't be fun at all. Figuring out what you are supposed to do while failing is half the fun of the GTA missions.

GTA was actually one of the games where the save system didn't work right - the save point was at the wrong place, i.e. before the mission briefing, not before starting the actual mission, which meant that if you failed you have to endure the entire setup again and again and again and...
This is the reason why I never completed any one of these games because I eventually got always stuck on some mission where you had to drive around for several minutes, have some briefing, drive again for several minutes and then have 30 seconds of action and die again. If I have to figure first out how to approach a mission I think it's common courtesy to place the save point so that this doesn't become a chore.

Aside from that, fuck politics. If politics start to decide how to design the engine, count me out. In that case I'd just quit and do my own thing.

[Nash]

Um, offtopic, heh, but in the newer GTAs, you can continue mid-mission if you die (they've setup several checkpoints per mission for you), and if you fail enough times, they even let you skip the mission entirely. Completing the mission with no deaths and in the fastest time possible, as well as other misc challenges (like "complete mission without scratching your car") gets you better medals at the end of that particular mission, for those who like completing challenges.

Anyway, carry on. :)

[gramps]

Honestly, I don't get the politics here at all.

I get that there's conflict between modders who want custom savegame behavior and players who want to save whenever they want. But it seems like this could be resolved without new mapinfo stuff and user overrides. Does it really need to be done on a per-map basis? Couldn't you take the save menu out entirely, make save points, and let the player hit F2 if they want to savescum? Everybody wins and devs can work on other stuff.

On the other hand, limiting saves on a per-map basis would definitely be useful for cases where you know for sure it'll break the game if you save there. Maybe those cases shouldn't exist, but you never know.