Menu Revamp - Need feedback

[Rachael]

Recently I saw a stream of a player, who literally never uses GZDoom, fumble around with the menu for what seemed like ages until he got the options to his liking. It was painful to watch.

Because of that, I've decided that I'm going to go ahead and spearhead this, but I feel like I will be a little more effective if I get feedback.

There's a catch, though: If you are a seasoned GZDoom veteran (like 99% of you on this forum are), you probably see what I see and don't see what's really important.

So the focus of this is a novice GZDoom user. If you have friends who use GZDoom very rarely, or have never even used it before, that's the person whose feedback I would find to be most valuable here. Short of that, we can only guess and speculate what the best options might be.

The basic idea behind the menu revamp is to put only the most relevant and important options front and center, and stick everything else behind an "Advanced" menu. Development of the "advanced" options menu will continue as it always has, where the "simplified" menu will need to be reviewed somewhat regularly and pruned in order to cut bloat.

For now I am going to release this as a mod - but a branch based on this mod has already been made. If anyone can provide feedback from your family and friends who are complete GZDoom novices, it would be most helpful. Thank you!

(Yes, I plan to do something similar to Raze in the near future)

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menu_revamp_mod.pk3

menu_revamp_mod.pk3

[Gez]

It's not a bad idea, but I'd call the old menu just "advanced", not "classic". "Classic" can evoke the idea of the vanilla menus by opposition to a menu for enhanced options.

[Rachael]

It's not a bad idea, but I'd call the old menu just "advanced", not "classic". "Classic" can evoke the idea of the vanilla menus by opposition to a menu for enhanced options.

Good point.

Posting update in OP.

[Rachael]

Keep in mind - even if you aren't a novice with GZDoom - if you are a person who experiences frustration of any sort using the menu - your feedback would be nice to have, too.

[Graf Zahl]

I would just call them "Full options". Not advanced, not enhanced or any other adjective that implies some need for higher knowledge.

[Major Cooke]

For starters, I'd like to see all mod options moved into a separate submenu under "Mod Options" which shows all the added submenus instead of right on the main options menu itself. I've seen people stumbling around there too, and it will help compact things a bit more. One that only shows up when there is a submenu added, I think, will help out.

(Another thing, an option to position it either at the top or the bottom for the user's convenience would be nice.)

[SanyaWaffles]

In DD2 and Scoot Hard DX I've done the same kind of idea because playtesters were having trouble just customizing controls, let alone fine tuning things like resolution. Considering these are meant to be standalone experiences and not mods per se, it's especially painful, especially since I know I'm not supposed to mess with the menus too much. What I did was just ask what settings they wanted to customize the most and added those to their own menus, and then let the advanced GZDoom menus be added later.

If you want, you can take a look at those for reference, but some of the menus are based on specific mod options too. I really want to help see this come to fruition.

The question is, what goes in the basic options is subjective, however there is so many goddamn setting that I don't think fit. Like I don't think I've ever messed with sound channels... ever, unless I'm specifically emulating something from the 90s. I don't think I've changed the hertz, unless, as I said, emulating a certain feel of a chunky old sound card.

Like how many users are going to use this except power users. Even power users like myself don't use this often... so it feels like overkill, especially for someone like my friend Blu Pearl Marisa who admittedly comes from console games where menus are much simpler... which I'm not gonna knock, keeping it simple is a philosophy I live by, but when I tell her alot of the menus are by default what GZDoom comes with we both groan.

I welcome this, in the end. I feel having some basic options and a much more advanced options is needed.

[kevansevans]

I think one of my personal issues I have with the menus is how often I find a setting super nested within the options. I understand the need to want to categorize every option under their own section, but most people don’t associate a setting under a specific category, but more under their niche categories like “graphics”, “controls”, etc. Users will go into these settings and skim to find the right set of words for what they need, but if anti-aliasing is under “opengl settings”, people aren’t likely to look under there because a) they don’t know what OpenGL is, and b) Anti-aliasing is typically it’s own standalone setting under the general graphics options.

tl;dr less sub menus please.

[Graf Zahl]

If you don't find something, there's always the search feature. It's really quite cool.

[leodoom85]

Quite curious about who was the streamer that you casually found, Rachael. I'll check the thing now.

EDIT: Ok, I checked it and.......idk, I have an idea.
Since it just takes it to the whole options for that thing, how about this?

You can put the most used options like mouse/keyboard and display (for example) in a group called basic options (you can gather that info to some users by asking what options they use the most to config the game). Then you can leave the advanced, full options like that in a second group.

[Lippeth]

The menu system never bothered me personally. The more available options without using the console the better! I may be in an extreme minority but I delete my ini file with every daily build or after trying out a mod with its own menu options and go through the menu in every game and adjust to my liking, and in less than a minute at this point. I do see the value in making the most common and obvious options upfront, and keeping the more nuanced tweaks behind another menu. But no matter how the menu is configured, I imagine that I'll get used to it. I also absolutely love how the main menu is automatically scaled in the more recent builds, thank you so much to whoever did that!

The only minor issue that ever comes up for me is that certain options are global and others aren't, and while I can understand the reason behind most of them, some feel a bit trivial at times. In Player setup, the name isn't global but autoaim is, which feels very backwards, as I use the same name across all games but I might turn autoaim off in one game and want it left on in another. I suppose it correlates with mouselook which makes sense but then I find it odd that they're in two separate menus (I don't think mouselook should be global either, but understand why it is). Lights affect sprites is another one that seems like it shouldn't be global, I like it on in some games and off in others. But since I don't feel like an average user per say and have my own particular taste, I trust the devs to make the right calls on things like that.

The only thing that I would consider even remotely frustrating are some of the default settings, like screen wipe style being set to melt for everything instead of what each original game used. But the fact that the options are there to change do make me happy.

[kevansevans]

If you don't find something, there's always the search feature. It's really quite cool.

This also assumes people know what the setting is named to begin with. In example, trying to turn texture resizing off, but the user doesn't know it's a filter or resize effect, so they search 'pixel' instead and get zero results: https://imgur.com/a/CL6qv6m Which means this is likely to leave a first impression on people who don't like the filtering that GZDoom "makes everything ugly" and "fake high res".

(And for the record, I actually had to find the setting just to remember that it was called texture filtering and resizing, and only could find it because I know where it is since I turn it off every time)

The point I was trying to make here is menu diving isn't fun. Finding settings in the program can be annoying for sure, and as handy a search feature is, it's not fool proof.

[gunofdis]

Every time I wander back to gzdoom after 6 months or a year of not thinking about it I get tripped up trying to remember what the setting to make the hud and crosshair not be tiny at high resolutions is called and what menu it's hiding in.

[Rachael]

Every time I wander back to gzdoom after 6 months or a year of not thinking about it I get tripped up trying to remember what the setting to make the hud and crosshair not be tiny at high resolutions is called and what menu it's hiding in.

This is exactly the kind of feedback that I am looking for.

This is not an easy problem to solve - I will pull the HUD options menu where it's at right now into the simplified list, but I think a few options within it could possibly stand to be combined together, if possible. Something that I can try and work on.

[Rachael]

New update posted. Added some new stuff. Hopefully not too much.