Monday, October 19, 2009

Menus!

One item of feedback that I've now received twice is that my menus can be a little - how shall we say - overwhelming. Now, I deliberately made them the way they are because I wanted to expose a lot of options to the player that normally one would have to go fooling around with either the command-line or the console for. Whatever about the menus, I believe that the command-line and the console are unduly hostile to folks who just want to play the damn game without having to delve into arcane crap.

However, I am taking the feedback on board as I'm also aware that a lot of people do just want to play the game with a set of sensible defaults, just need the stuff that ID originally provided, and couldn't give a flying one about the other options I've exposed.

The solution I've decided on is to add a "Simple Menus" toggle. This will essentially strip the Main Menu and the Options Menu of most of the extra stuff I've added - these are the two I believe are the biggest culprits here. I may also remove some stuff from the other menus in "Simple" mode - we'll see. The toggle is going to be available in both "Simple Mode" and "Full Mode", so you can switch between them if you don't like what you currently have.

It will require some small rearchitecting of the menu system - basically moving it to a stack rather than using a fixed previous pointer - in order to support ESCing back to an arbitrary previous menu. Or I might do it another way.

I might also restore the big chunky friendly Main Menu picture in "Simple" mode, but I'm not fully decided yet, so don't rely on it happening.

Two questions I'm currently pondering are: (1) should I even bother displaying the toggle in a menu or should I leave it as a cvar only, and (2) what should the default be (currently leaning towards "Simple")? What do you think?

6 comments:

kempie said...

My guess would be leave the toggle as a Cvar and default to Simple

Cheers, kempie

Andy said...

I second what kempie said.

xaGe said...

..I hate the simple! BUT for the sake of the regular "Joe Quaker"'s out there I suppose default simple would be best. As long as I have the option to switch it to use Advanced or whatever your calling it then good...

Anonymous said...

i'd say:

default to simple menu

use a toggle in the menu itself as well as a cvar and save the current state of the menu to that cvar and config.cfg on exit.
This way the menu will be restored to the same state you left it in when you launch DirectQ again..

=peg=

mhquake said...

Looks like it's going to be default to Simple, have a toggle in the Options menu for switching Advanced/Full Menus on, and saving the preference in config.cfg.

mhquake said...

By the way: toggles in the menu are actually cvars, they're both the same thing.