Week 12/2014: Shell fixes

skyjake

Last week I already started my candidate phase work while DaniJ is finishing off with the revised savegame code. The builds are still labeled "unstable" pending the merge of DaniJ's work branch.

I've addressed the following issues so far:

• Automatic local discovery was not enabled in the Shell apps.
• The GUI Shell app now has a checkbox for specifying if the started local server is a public one, and one can specify a password for Shell access.
• If a local server fails to start, the GUI Shell app will now show the error log from the server to help with diagnosing the issue (just warnings/errors, not the full doomsday.out).
• Log output was coming in with an inconvenient delay in the Shell apps (for instance when autocompleting words).
• Antialising was always on in Ring Zero after launching Doomsday, even though it was supposed to remember the setting used in the previous session.

DaniJ

Last week I finalized most of the revised savegame code for 1.14 and began work on polishing up savegame-refactor branch for merging back to the master.

As you can see, savegames are now available in and are loadable from Ring Zero:


Savegames for any game can now be loaded at any time, from anywhere. This works much like game selection in the Multiplayer Games menu.

Unfortunately there is one rather stubborn bug which is holding up proceedings. It occurs in Hexen and currently prevents a saved game from being loaded (from anywhere). As such we can't yet merge this work. Once I've managed to track the bug down it should be pretty trivial to fix, after all, the rest of the games are working as expected. After which I intend to switch to 1.14 candidate polishing myself.

Edit: Just a quick update to say that we've now managed to locate the aforementioned bug (which turned out to be an issue in the virtual file system). It may not be as easy to resolve this as I had first expected.

Vermil

I may be being presumptuous and there is still a week and a half before release. But if the worst comes to the worst, perhaps consider the Ring Zero save game list omitting HeXen?

The ability to load Doom, Heretic, HacX and Chex Quest save games from within other games and Ring Zero still highlights the new save game code and the UI; HeXen could always turn up in a potential 1.14.1.

Maybe display the HeXen saves, but blank them out like a game with missing resources? With a message saying HeXen will come later, if the user clicks on or highlights a HeXen save.

DaniJ

We've since managed to track down and fix that problem. Support for Hexen savegames is now working as expected.