phi108 wrote:Maybe the least abuse-prone...
Given that mod abuse of the menus (or anything or that matter) could only ever be limited to making the mod itself crap, I personally am not concerned about it. I used to be worried about some dick making an annoying mod that would make the game hard to play but:
a) There are dozens of ways to annoy a user already
b) annoying mods of this type haven't really appeared despite a)
c) No changes are permanent
d) such annoyances would only mean the mod itself was rubbish and would therefore be quit from and not played again.
I'm sure that, given that this foray into the menu code seems pretty much like a ground-up re-write anyway, it would presumably be trivial to add a user preference to disable menu modding if that were deemed appropriate.
I would much rather see a modable menu that was as flexible as possible - not so much for simple Doom mods, but for things such as stand alone games that use Zdoom where a great many of the items in the menu can be irrelevant and detract from the otherwise professional appearance of the mod. eg in my own personal mod, I have edited the source to remove the compat options menu because it makes no sense to have it in my game. If such changes could be applied via a proper menu configuration lump, so much the better. (and the menu hasn't actually gone in my mod, you can still call it from the console.)
I'd be happy enough for safeguards to be in place (the user var I suggested, or perhaps restricting the more far reaching modifications to games running using custom IWADs) but I really do feel that flexibility here would be a good thing. Of course, I realise that this may not be a wholly shared viewpoint and, of course, such considerations are probably a long way off anyway. However, it is great to see the menu system being looked at because I think that it is the last major part of the engine that remains "locked in the code" and off limits to modders.
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