Interrupt
Idea: launcher GUI
3RD and I agreed on Discord that a launcher GUI that allows the player to choose various parameters on startup would be a great addition. Examples:
- OpenGL on/off
- texture filtering on/off
- other possible OpenGL specific features on/off
- fullscreen vs. windowed
- resolution selector
- show or hide console output
- mod selector
- save file to continue from, possibly picking up all of the above from that save's preferences
Making such a thing is of course time consuming, but would go a long way toward user friendliness.
There no need external launcher. We may extend options menu with our configuration.
I agree that an external launcher isn't required for things that we could add to the in game options menu. A little window that would let people point their game at the data files without requiring someone to copy the files in to the right folder would be nice though, especially on platforms like OSX where the app is going to be packaged up into a .app folder that isn't straightforward to edit.
Yeah, the entire point here was to suggest a convenience utility for things that would otherwise require command line parameters (mods), tweaking the internals of the game itself (eg. resolutions), or that would be cumbersome to change after the game has already started (eg. console output).
I kind of believe that this would be more convenient to develop, too, than modifying the in-game UI to fiddle with the aforementioned values. I'm honestly kind of surprised at the negative reaction.
One project to look at for "create a simple OS-independent window to prompt the user for a simple question on startup" would be GZDoom. It does introduce a UI toolkit into the dependencies though, which could add major headaches to the build process.
Compromise: Maybe just switch to a plaintext config file format, with all options documented?
