[thatguy]

I started playing the game Blood once again, and one thing I noticed was that it had no 'company' logo animations or title animations, etc. The first thing you see is the loading screen for the demo in the background for the menu. Now what does that have to do with the subject at hand? Well, very little but a hint of an idea came out of it.

The question that must be answered before it can be reality is to ask 'can you start a game and have it send you straight to a map, or is it hardcoded to be forced to visit the menu first'?

Now the idea spawned from the idea of going straight to a map and the understanding of how broad the capabilities of con editing is. If we can by pass the menu itself, couldn't we create a custom menu within a map? Not to mention create some interesting effects incapable of being done without messing with the eDuke source?

Sure the only flaw with this idea is the 'esc' key which brings up the menu....but that can be used as an in-game menu and maybe disable it from being used when in the main menu map. Who knows. Just a thought. I wouldn't mind contributing to an easy to use system for tc/modders to create their own menu's and setting up the game the way they want it.

Any thoughts?

[Danukem]

Yeah it's a good idea and I have actually tried this before. I wanted to make it like HL2 where you are looking at a dynamic scene in a map while having the menu in front of you. There are some technical limitations that make it difficult or impossible right now. Off the top of my head, the one that really threw me is there is no way to select a saved game to load. You can bring up the real game menu, of course, but then the game is hardcoded to pause and become greyed out in the background, which defeats the whole purpose.

The game menu is very outdated and it can't be edited in CON, which is frustrating. Using EDuke32, you can make a game that is modern in many respects but it sucks that we have to go through that ugly episode and difficulty selection interface from Duke 3D to start it.

[Fox]

Some points that would be necessary to remove the episode screen:

1 - Virtually remove the limit of maps per episode. I think it is currently 32, but it could be increased to a ridiculous high value like 256. Especially taking in consideration that you can create maps for separate areas and using startlevel command, etc.

2 - A flag that would bypass the episode screen and start right off episode 1 level 1.

3 - A flag that would bypass the skill screen and start right off skill 1.

4 - A flag to disable an episode, like in shareware Duke. Not an essencial option, but I would like to see it anyway.

[thatguy]

I too do not like the episode screen mainly because it detracts from the atmosphere and purpose of the project i'm working on....though temporarily I have changed it make it work for now.

I like Fox's idea though. Just a way to bypass the episode screen altogether would be great.

Though I fear this is only possible if someone program's these flags into the hard coded eDuke source. Sadly i'm not good with collaborative source code.

[The Commander]

I am pretty sure you can launch eduke straight into any map using commands that would normaly be used for multiplayer.

[Fox]

That would pass through any screen and load the whole game right off the map...

[High Treason]

I've never tested, but wouldn't it be possible to do something in EVENT_DISPLAYMENU such as use startlevel to send the player to a level as soon as the game attempts to display the menu?

I might mess about with this, I'm quite certain that it could even be effectively "bound to ESC" if save/loadmapstate and some vars were used... The only issue with this is that it would be slow.
Of course it wouldn't really be bound to ESC, it would simply be set up so that the menu only appeared if the player was in the "menu-level".

[Hendricks266]

TerminX referenced the future rewriting of the menu code with CON expandability a long time ago but it's such a low priority that it was forgotten or waylaid.

s.b.Newsom, on 13 January 2012 - 01:24 AM, said:

I started playing the game Blood once again, and one thing I noticed was that it had no 'company' logo animations or title animations, etc. The first thing you see is the loading screen for the demo in the background for the menu.

By default it does in fact play SMK files with the Monolith and GT Interactive logos but it's very common to use the command-line switch that disables them.

DeeperThought, on 13 January 2012 - 07:59 AM, said:

Yeah it's a good idea and I have actually tried this before. I wanted to make it like HL2 where you are looking at a dynamic scene in a map while having the menu in front of you.

Have you tried using demo files? If you keep a level defined in the game which only displays the behavior of the idle scene like HL2 and make a demo of it which ends where it loops, when the main menu plays it, it should be relatively close to the HL2 menu background.