Graf Zahl wrote:'The real problems arise when people who are not qualified to assess the importance of certain options try to do anyway and decide to remove them.
The simplest solution to deterring modders from overriding menus to make them more user-friendly is probably for the GZDoom developers to do it themselves. This has the added benefit of making the menus more user-friendly. Everyone wins!
The mod I've been working on is also one intended to reach a larger audience, and I also came to the conclusion that the menus needed to be simplified and made more user-friendly in order to achieve this effectively. (See:
this comic edit Ed the Bat found.) My solution (made before the ability to add onto existing menus, and reached after quickly realizing that my redefining of the default menus was not a good plan) was to link to my "friendlier" options menu from the main menu, and keep ZDoom's default and fully-featured options menu, completely unmodified, inside an "advanced menu" item at the bottom of my options menu.
I think it'd be great if GZDoom did this itself: create a new, friendlier options menu to be the default, and keep the full "advanced" menu accessible from within it. The developers / community can assess for themselves the importance of all the available options to the layman, and work on making this new basic menu as user-friendly as possible. There should also be a new option within the advanced menu to make it appear instead of the basic menu when accessing "options" from the main menu.
In particular, one thing I think GZDoom desperately needs is full descriptions for menu items so that users can read up to learn exactly what all the settings do, rather than guessing based on their limited presentation. Long descriptions for menu options are available on the wiki, so it'd make sense for these to be available in-engine as well. There are a couple ways this could be done. One method (used by the Dolphin Emulator and DOOM 2016, for example) is to have a dedicated area at the bottom of the screen for showing a description of the selected menu item (and its options, if applicable). Another option is adding a way to access a "help" pop-up for any menu item, which brings up a scrollable text window, to ensure descriptions of any size can be used. Possible methods for accessing "help" include a (?) button that appears next to every item, or one in a corner that the user can activate to make the next menu item they activate bring up the help for it. A dedicated keybind (eg. right mouse button, shift key) for activating help would also be nice. In general, this description feature could also be used to display other relevant information, such as which file/mod added the option, and exactly what CVAR the menu option controls (should be an opt-in setting so as not to be an information overload for basic users).
Additionally, in making my own basic menu, I changed the names, presentation, and location/categorization of a bunch of the standard options because I found GZDoom's presentation of them inaccurate or misleading. I spent a lot of time working on this (though it was a while ago), so I'd love to contribute to a discussion about doing this in GZDoom proper.
(This post kind of turned into a feature suggestion as I wrote more about it. I'll still post it here—I did write it in response to this discussion on replacing options menus, after all—but mods can break this off into a separate Feature Suggestion thread if they want.)