I'm spending a lot of time working on the new menu system for the next release, and while I could push everything else aside and just focus on that, (1) I'd get burned out on menus, and (2) the next release would have nothing else new in it. I don't think we want either of those to happen.
Nonetheless, this is an inportant update to the engine, as it allows me to expose a lot of user configurability very quickly and easily. Adding new options to the old menus was a bit messy, not difficultly so but definitely tiresomely so. It's reasonabe to suppose that a lot of other engines didn't expose their options fully for that reason. Now I can add a new option with a single line of code. I can switch the order of options around, move options from one menu to another or create new submenus very quickly and easily.
In theory it's even possible to extend it to a scriptable menu system, but that's well off in the future, if it ever does happen.
This lets me expose a lot more useful things to the casual user, and even the more experienced user doesn't have to bother going searching through cvars to find things out. It will all be there.
Naturally getting the original menus fully ported over is priority 1, so the upcoming release will only have those, and not much else (I added "Save Current Configuration" to Options).
No doubt some of the hardcore ultra-trad die-hards will be clamouring for the original menus to be brought back, but this is a point-of-no-return change. I think it's very much for the better.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Engine Configurability
Posted by
mhquake
at
2:08 PM
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